Memories of the Fall

Evergrove the Fair, jewel of three Duchies.

How my heart dreams of your leafy boulevards.

To walk among the gardens, to see beauties dance beside its fountains.

These ears weep that they cannot hear the music of your taverns or the words of your minstrels.

Mine eyes yearn to bask once again in the glory and majesty of your past endeavours.

When your men challenged the darkness below, and womenfolk spun miracles in water and gold.

Alas, I am here, in these deserts of red death, far from your marble streets and verdant plazas.

Only the memory of your fair maidens and beautiful vistas in my mind’s eye.

Though my blade is turned to dark deeds and distant woes, I dream of you still, solace of my mind.

Keep thee safe, memory of my youth, for someday I shall yet return to you once more.

Recollections on Evergrove.

~Author Unknown

~ Arai & Sana – Evergrove ~

Standing on the tower-top above the gateway, between the inner and outer city, looking down over the city districts below, it became clear to both of them that the academy and the city were, in fact, neighbouring districts. What they had taken to be the academy was more likely wealthy estates and buildings dedicated to ruling. The great school, which sprawled across the mountain slope behind them, was comprised of a series of vast complexes of red, white and grey stone buildings, appearing almost as large as the inner city in and of itself.

The scope of the city across the valley had been hidden from them before, by one of the low ridgelines with their impassable low cloud, and by perspective. Afforded this new vantage point, she could determine that it was easily bigger than Blue Water City. The school alone was nearly the size of West Flower Picking Town, which was in its own right vaguely mind-boggling.

In the other direction, it was possible to get a proper view over the vale they had been in and also the land beyond the ridgeline where the ruined fortress lay in the distance. Annoyingly, much of the immediate view over towards it was still obscured by low cloud.

The plaza where they had ‘arrived’ had been relatively close to the valley slope into that inner vale. They had cut through various streets and up main boulevards in their two-hour ascent to the main plaza. Looking back on it, that initial path through the city, combined with the incursion of vegetation in the middle distance and an inability to get to higher vantage points because of the battle damage, had left them with a rather skewed notion of how big the city actually was. Two great parks spread out, dividing the east and west of the city which were, in fact, terraced on the mountain slope itself. It was also clear, at this height, that the valley behind them was longer than they had given it credit for.

Shading her eyes, Arai looked across the mountain slope and frowned. “The point of attack was obviously over there.”

She gestured towards the smashed fortress on the west side, which was nearly demolished and still had fires burning in it, frozen in a perpetual blaze.

“Yeah… and the scale of the carnage is immense…” Sana said in a quiet voice.

Both were able to see that quite clearly with their enhanced vision in the late afternoon light before it started to fade. Piles of corpses, some still burnt, littered other squares. Gardens had become charnel pits, once glorious buildings now macabre displays of the inhumanity of one man to another. It also made clear that the frozen aspects of this place were very weird indeed.

Everything that seemed related directly to the city itself, and the actions around its sack, were frozen. Damaged plants had not regrown, parted waters in a lake had not fallen, and in some places, whole buildings were cast upwards into the air. Through it all, the tidal wave of turgid waters was scattered. From this height, their vantage point drew disparate parts together to make the scale of it clear even without any recurrence of the nightmarish vision she had suffered.

On the other hand, trees and vegetation had grown over the walls and were slowly subsuming boulevards, spreading outwards from the parks and the flowing river that ran down out of the mountain. Seasons clearly still turned here in some fashion. They could interact with the environment just as much as they could in the valley. Only the corpses and things relating directly to bodies were ‘frozen’ in that way.

At this scale, the city did have an aura as well. The only reason they hadn’t been seeing it before was simply that they had been looking on too small a scale and been very paranoid in how they used their qi sense. As soon as she pushed out her qi perception sphere, which she could just about manage to do now, the full force of the unsettling intents in this place became properly apparent. Without her mantra to feed her fear and emotional turmoil to she would not have dared try it. Even then…

“It’s like standing outside a cave you know has some reclusive thirteen-star monster in it….” she said quietly.

“Yeah... And it’s only because you don’t enter into their sight somehow that they don’t just squash you flat…” Sana muttered.

The sun was just setting now, the stars starting to shine in the darkening sky. Clouds obscured the peaks above them once more, and the swirling spray of the phantasmal waters glittered across the city below, but the sky remained clear. The moon, newly risen over the far peaks, was large and bright, just as it had been in the vale. Its light made the forested slopes below shine in the moonlight to their enhanced eyes.

“It’s strange though…. You would think a place like this at night, with such a full moon, should feel creepy and wrong… yet it actually feels more comfortable somehow?” Sana looked at the lengthening shadows that were moving across the plazas far below.

“The darkness isn’t oppressive… well it is, but it’s… hard to describe isn’t it…” she said softly. “And the distance... I wonder how much of that has to do with the way we got transformed though.”

Sana started eating another piece of fruit. They had found no unrotten food on the stands or in shops, but trees had fruits that were perfectly okay for consumption. The qi within them was not inconsiderable as well, to the point where you could genuinely consider them low-grade spirit fruits.

“Like we have some kind of acknowledgement somehow?” she took one of the fruits and also started to eat it.

“It’s possible….” She continued, “Then again…”

She reached out and felt the qi… they could get it from the fruits, but while it was perceivable in the air it was untouchable to them. Not in the same way as in the vale, but truly untouchable, as if it wasn’t even qi, just a memory of it, or a shadow maybe.

“It’s like everything within the city has been cursed in some way.” Sana agreed.

Watching the shimmering stars, she let herself get lost in tracing the strange constellations in the sky as they became visible one after another. It was hard to say how much came from the horror and a projection of her own feelings from when they had walked through below, but everything here, even the starry sky, felt… sad. There was anger, yes, and grief, and fury, and horror and judgement and so many other intents. But the sadness, like something beyond their comprehension was weeping on its behalf, was by far the most profound and deep-rooted.

She turned away from looking at the sky, back to the rest of the city below them. It was dark now, drenched in silver and black beneath the full moon. It took her a while to work out what the oddity about the scene really was. None of the corpses of the defenders were in places that were lit. It was so subtly done that it barely even felt off until she looked at those shadows and shivered... because they reflected the stars themselves, almost as if the starry night had cast down a cloak to cover those corpses directly. The longer she looked at it the more right it felt, yet at the same time it was disturbing on some fundamental level. As if she were seeing some inner working of reality that you just weren’t meant to see. Not to mention, the sadness that came with it was even more soul twisting. After a while, she turned her head and went back to considering the inner city instead.

They had debated trying to leave the city before nightfall, but the only exterior wall they had encountered had such an ominous feeling that neither felt at all like risking it. In the end, they had picked this tower on the edge of the inner city because it was both accessible and lacking in obvious battle damage. It also gave them a good vantage point and had an intact upper floor so they didn’t have to sit in a ruined dark room. Most importantly though, it wasn’t full of corpses.

Below her, someone, or ones, had made a concerted effort to set most of the tree-lined street on fire. The gate and wall above it had been cloven asunder as if by some great sword. None of those trees touched by fire had vitality in them, but others in what were presumably once grassy lawns around them almost overshadowed them now. Beyond that a twisting column of fire that provided no actual outward illumination swirled like a golden gyre close to the middle of the inner city. Even at this distance, it made her feel strangely sombre as it danced and twisted eternally in the darkness. With the terrible violence and bloodshed meted out in the streets below covered by the carpet of autumnal leaves, also strangely coloured in the darkness, the scene was otherworldly both in how small it made her feel and how melancholic.

The shadows somehow drew you in even as the vault of heaven seemed to press down, shrouding everything, shadows in star and moonlight shifting subtly. Here, once again it was impossible to not notice how they occasionally extended just a little further or a little deeper in some places than was natural.

She lost all track of time watching them shift and swirl, stuck somewhere between heaven and earth, a silent witness to the sadness and the echoing memories they evoked until she was stirred from her meditative state by Sana whistling at her.

Looking around, the shadows were receding and the grey light of first dawn was making its presence felt. The sun was hidden in cloud. Most importantly though, the first hint of misty drizzle was also making its presence felt.

“It’s starting to rain, I figured you didn’t want to get doused,” Sana said from where she was sat, juggling a bunch of fruit.

“Mmmm, yeah,” she agreed.

It was cooler, marginally. Still, it would be a muggy, humid day once the cool dawn had passed, for all that the season was clearly striving to be autumn. In all the time they had been here, she had never really gotten a grasp on that. Summer had been dry, but the first spring had been close to sub-tropical, while this, despite being autumnal, was more like the wet season from back home. Yet winter had been so cold as to be almost unreal.

Standing up, she did a few stretches. Her body had refined most of the qi from the fruits, but what it was doing with it was still pretty strange and didn’t quite tally with what she expected.

“Well, I guess we shouldn’t waste daylight?”

“Yeah,” Sana agreed.

“Did you see the shadows at night?” her sister asked after a while.

“Yeah, and I am in no hurry to look at them up close,” she muttered.

“Fates no,” Sana slid off the wall. “Probably not dangerous, but bad enough to give you a weird sense of vertigo.”

“Inner city, then? Inside or out?”

It wasn’t really a question. Both of them had discussed it extensively the previous day, after all. However, speaking about the course of action did somehow make her feel… better. It was a simple exercise to ward off the stress that they were both feeling and make sure that neither of them did anything silly.

Peering down the trapdoor at the locked door below, Sana sighed. “Out, I think.”

Without further comment, she swung over the edge and started her descent. The tower was about forty metres tall, but there were plenty of handholds, even if the damp made it a tad harder than it had been to ascend. However, it was by no means unmanageable, she considered, dropping from ledge to ledge. It also provided her with another opportunity to examine the changes occurring in her body.

Sana slipped over the edge above her and also started her descent, following slightly to one side.

…

Contrary to the initial impression of the previous day and her observations during the night, the inner city was just as ravaged as the outer. It just turned out to be better disguised due to the economy of scale involved. The architecture was much grander, the estates more contained and the buildings in between less sprawling compared to the lower city. The buildings also seemed much more heavily and obviously warded. Their tower was at one end of a broad, tree-lined boulevard that led up from the gate into the inner city. Thirty metre wide lawns on either side gave the impression that it was less a street and more of a long, narrow park. In any case, much of it was now heavily overgrown. Tangled thickets meandered between trees, planters and stone-lined flowerbeds were almost buried under vines and drifts of breast-high grass swayed gently as dawn mists wound through everything.

There was no particular pattern to the vegetation itself that she could see. Plants from a dozen habitats were all growing happily together, so they probably originated from various gardens and flowerbeds. The whole thing was broken up by the occasional patches of smouldering fire. In the daylight it was much less visible, treacherously so in fact, because it had heat such that she struggled to stand near one blaze while observing that the vegetation growing rampantly was totally untouched. Vibrant vegetation with grass growing freely on lawns right up to the edge of burnt patches and herbaceous borders swapping seamlessly back and forth from flickering flames to apparently healthy wildflowers. The golden blaze in the distance ahead of them was even more obscure somehow, cloaked in the mists in a strange fashion, its light unnaturally muted.

-Just more things to add to the list of ‘disturbing in its own way’, she sighed to herself.

On the other hand, the landscape damage to the road surface and flowerbeds, radiating in ripples half a metre in height, was a complete fate-thrashed nuisance. There were several different waves of ripple patterns, and they were all blurred together in irregular and random ways, such that traversing them and keeping an eye out for hidden patches of fire eventually forced them to cut through the gardens to one of the side paths next to the estates that lined the road.

Unlike the city below, where people had built up to conserve space, the complexes and estates here were both tall and sprawling. Winding streets led between irregularly shaped walled compounds, many of which were also warped and distorted by the heat of some fire blast that had occurred somewhere ahead of them. On this side of the pathways, she could get a much clearer idea of the scale of damage that was being covered over by the vegetation.

“The damage must have been pretty total before something flipped over the soil in a later shockwave,” Sana said from beside her as she was mulling over one of the half-burnt flowerbeds.

“Yeah, the more we see of this place, the weirder it gets,” she muttered.

“Have you noticed that our scrips’ recording in here is very, very weird?” Sana said after a moment.

“I must admit I hadn’t thought to try,” she replied.

Sana wordlessly passed her the scrip, and she viewed a recording Sana had just made, seemingly a few minutes ago as they passed one of the estates. The damage to it was there, preserved in full detail. Decorations blurred and melted, inscriptions warped and decorative stele standing by the gateway half sunk into the ground. On the other hand, the damage bled bizarrely, obscuring details that were not damaged, and the vegetation was a warped and jumbled mess of impossible angles. Only the trees and a few plants in flowerbeds were visible.

“It’s almost like there are two 'scenes' slipping through each other,” she mused, turning to look at the gardens again.

“Yeah, like someone took this place… without any buildings and just with vegetation and mashed it together with the city as it was in that frozen moment…” Sana said, taking the scrip back with a resigned expression that admitted a certain amount of defeat in the face of illogicality.

They walked on in silence, looking around them for another hundred metres, before finally reaching the edge of the genuine blaze she had seen from the top of the tower. It was spread across the whole width of the boulevard. Had it not been inexplicably frozen in the way it was, she was certain it would have swept down the whole avenue to the gate, incinerating everything in its path. The temperature was so hot that they couldn’t go within twenty metres of it.

After some futile poking around, they eventually turned back and picked the first side road. Beyond the first layer of estates, the streets became much more akin to those below, albeit with much grander buildings. Even here everything showed some evidence of battle damage. Inscriptions and stele melted, doors blasted in, holes through walls where wards still flickered ominously. In some instances, whole wall carvings and statues appeared to have been simply ripped away.

They eventually found one of the carts around the next bend in the street. A dozen of the dead were littered around and a few more were in the process of collapsing to the ground, faces locked in agony and terror amid the lingering afterimages of the spray from the Yellow Springs. That didn’t surprise her at this point, although on a certain level she was still edgy about wandering around in it. The night vista had made it abundantly clear that that wave of ominous water, somehow called forth by the execution of Marcella, had submerged the whole city, near enough, before whatever it was had occurred to lock this whole place away like it was.

Out of curiosity she picked her way over to the cart and looked at the topmost carving they had dumped in it. It was a carved scene depicting a great cityscape, actually rather reminiscent of the city they were in. The craftsmanship of the carvings was exquisite, with beautifully stylized details throughout. Pulling herself up, she considered the rest of the contents, mainly statues of beautiful women in various unclad states and inscriptions in a dozen different scripts, none of which she recognised.

“They are even stealing the carvings… isn't that a bit…?” Sana pushed one of the other blocks aside to look at another behind it.

“I think it’s pretty well established at this point that the attackers don’t seem to be people of what father would have called ‘good character’ or ‘classical morals’,” she said, as drily as she could muster, flicking through the inscriptions to see if any were in Easten that she could read.

“You don’t say,” Sana said, rolling her eyes at her attempt at humour.

Chuckling under her breath, she hopped off that cart and went to look at the next one. The horses that would have drawn it were slightly slumped in their harnesses, blood frozen mid-drip from their mouths and eyes and pooling on the ground. Dead from soul shock, she guessed.

The next cart was much like the last one, but mostly contained stacked square blocks about half a metre across. Flipping one over, she saw it was carved ornately in a circular design with a bunch of plants. Pushing it aside, she looked at a few more and discovered that they were all the same. Out of curiosity and because there was really nothing better to do she took the four and set them out, only to stare at them, rotate two ninety degrees and then just squat down with a sign and put her chin in her hands. Sana, having given up on the previous cart, came to join her and stared at the four panels before looking at the rest of the stack.

“Are those floor tiles?”

“They are indeed, I think. Inlaid with various precious stones as well,” she remarked drily.

“Floor tiles...” her sister said dully. “I suddenly find myself without words.”

Sana went and looked at the other bodies lying around the cart as she just knelt there, trying to work out why she felt just a little bit depressed all of a sudden. There were more tiles on the other side of the cart by the looks of it,scattered where one of the people stacking them had fallen mid-action. Clearly, they came from the complex behind, as another body was slumped with two in its hands halfway to the door, which was open and apparently unwarded if possessing a rather inauspicious gloom.

-Like the mouth of a tomb, she thought, finally standing and walking over to it, suppressing her trepidation.

The room beyond was in disarray, she observed as she cautiously peered inside, noting as she did so that the door was bent slightly and there was a weird symbol punched into the metal covering. The dying vestiges of some kind of formation with qi in it glimmered faintly in her eyes. Whoever had opened the door had done so under resistance and with some force.

Inside, tables of wood were flipped over and smashed, with two half-eviscerated corpses slumped against the far wall, dressed in similar clothes. Blood and gore mingled with the spilt and rotten produce from sacks of goods, stacked beside the bodies in a horrifically timeless manner. Both the dead were young, she noted, barely twelve or thirteen... a knife lay near one, with bloody fingerprints still on its handle.

Sana entered behind her and winced, putting a hand to her face.

Belatedly she noted that the smell of death and decay, barely noticeable outside and almost absent in the city below, was present here for some reason. Such was her detachment from her senses that she had just ignored it without thinking. Only like that could she even keep functioning in the face of this endless parade of horrors. Every one she saw made her feel like a little bit more of her girlish innocence had somehow died with the victims. Looking around the rest of the room, she noted the lattice-like formations that were ghosting the walls. They were barely visible, and would – if powered – have likely been invisible. As it was, even with her inexpert eye, she could see that something had twisted them in a strange way. Damaged them fundamentally so that they could not regain energy.

Stepping through into the next room, which turned out to be a storeroom of food, all rotted and decaying, she finally found the inner courtyard of the estate beyond it. Just like the exterior, it was overgrown, but in this case, it was just the flowers of the garden itself. The main offender was a sprawling vine with beautiful purple and gold flowers that looked and smelt like jasmine but held no spiritual power at all. The pond in the middle was carpeted with water lilies. Carefully she moved some aside with a fallen vine strand, half expecting to find some dead fish, but there was nothing in the pool besides plants.

Most of the other exits were sealed with flickering runes that had very ominous auras. By this point Sana had joined her, so they both made their way carefully over to the only other exit that was still open, leading into an interior hall, she guessed. Inside was remarkably untouched, except that all the furniture had been stripped and stacked to one side and half the floor tiles were torn up. At the end was another room. Walking up to it and looking inside she finally paid for not steeling herself as they were met with a scene of carnage so unnaturally brutal and debauched that all she could do was stagger over to a convenient planter and puke into it. Sana had followed suit and was cursing under her breath. It took quite a while, but she finally got her turbulent emotions under control. Grimly she walked over, pulled the door shut and then grabbed a handful of the jasmine and scattered it across the threshold, bowing three times to the dead and offering a prayer for their souls and a curse for those who had butchered them.

Back outside, Sana paused for a moment and picked up one of the roof tiles and, with serious venom, pounded it down on the head of one of the attackers. However, against all expectation, it was the tile that shattered, not the skull of the person she had just targeted.

“Mmmm,” she frowned, shoving the corpse with her foot. “That’s odd…”

Under her impetus and with a bit of effort, it shifted a small bit.

“Cursed fates have no eyes…” Sana spat.

It was hard to disagree with that statement, really. On the other hand, something about Sana’s action had stirred a distant memory of something Juni, of all people, had once told her.

Turning to look at the other bodies, she kicked a few others. They all moved, just, and she was left with a feeling that she had just kicked a metal brick in the process.

“Want to try a quick experiment?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

The conversation playing back in her head was one she had had with Juni about body recovery and high-level cultivators. It had been the very first such mission she undertook, to recover a Dao Seeking wandering cultivator who had gone missing in one of the valleys on a tendered mission. Upon finding the corpse she had been aghast to discover how heavy it was in spite of the suppression, and upon coming back had complained at length to Juni about not being told that. The events had spawned a long discussion about how cultivators at higher realms had much denser bodies due to qi reinforcement, among other things.

“Hardly seems the time…” her sister said sourly, staring at the cart, clearly pondering if a bigger slab would do it.

Shaking her head, she went back inside. If her sudden hunch was right, it would go a long way towards explaining a few things about this place. Offering a small prayer and an apology to one of the destroyed corpses lying against the wall, she first tried to move it. Half confirming her suspicions, it was light, just as a child’s body would be. Wincing, she gripped the arm, exerting her full strength. Even though she was back in the Containment Realm, she was still several times stronger than an average adult male at the peak of Foundation Establishment.

The child’s flesh deformed under her grip and she felt the bones in the arm start to creak. The poor soul was mortal. She considered the knife on the floor for a moment and then picked it up. A careful poke opened up the palm of the corpse. She prodded a table and it easily cut wood as well. Nodding, she went back outside and squatted down beside the corpse Sana had just tried to brain with a floor tile.

Her sister, who was dragging one of the denser inscription slabs off the other cart, paused to look at her.

“What are you doing?” she asked, eyeing the knife.

“The same thing you are, but with some empiricism,” she said with as much dark humour as she could muster. “An experiment of sorts.”

Taking the knife, she stabbed it into the eye of the corpse. The knife warped, the tip shattering and pinging away across the street. That at least explained why there was no blood at all on it. Sighing, she eyed the knife then looked back at the floor tiles.

-Wasn’t there one that was different? With arborundum? Her memory helpfully supplied for her.

It took a few moments to find it deep in the pile. There were quite a few now that she looked more closely, but most of the arborundum inlay was flowers or esoteric shapes. Pulling this particular tile off the cart, she hefted it up and smashed it into the body. It took three tries, and she was panting from exertion by the time she was done, but she finally shattered it along one edge and levered out a long leaf of arborundum that belonged to a stylised palm tree or maybe a lily plant.

Returning to the street, she picked an armoured corpse at random and scored a circle in the breastplate it wore. Running back through some of the basic array symbols she recalled from when she was practising, she eventually selected one that involved ‘separation’ or perhaps ‘cutting’. In a single fluid motion, she drew it, taking care not to get the symbol the wrong way around, and then pushed a tiny thread of her purified qi into it.

With a metallic *Thock*, the breastplate and the cloth beneath were both cut as she had hoped. The flesh beneath, somewhat in line with the more realistic side of her expectations, didn’t even deform. It at least confirmed that the bodies were cultivators and above her admittedly meagre cultivation.

“Their bodies are trained…” Sana said, coming over to join her.

“But the servants inside were all mortals,” she noted. “I was able to squeeze one of their arms and it gave just like flesh should. Their bones were a bit more durable than you might expect, but that’s likely down to having lived in this place, where the qi just seems… purer, for all that it’s untouchable.”

Experimentally Sana tried to lift one of the corpses. It took a lot of effort, but she managed to drag it up. It didn’t help that death rigidity had not set in yet, so it was limp as well as heavy.

“It’s at least peak Nascent Soul?” she hazarded.

“Possible, could be lower if they trained in a body art? They look less like soldiers and more like irregulars. Mercenaries, even. This one had tattoos, and their gear is rather mismatched.”

She eyed the tattoo that Sana had exposed on another one's arm dubiously. It was actually a holy Buddhist symbol, but drawn in such a way that it was clearly inauspicious. No Buddhist would have a skull devouring the sign of Buddha’s footsteps through the samsara on their arm.

“An evil cult?” she mused.

“Ya think?” her sister said sarcastically.

“Yeah, stupid question, given the context,” she acknowledged with an eye roll.

She tried lifting another. Quite a few were only as heavy as the others but over half of them, those with better gear, she couldn’t so much as budge.

“What I don’t get, is why could we not move weapons and stuff below?” Sana mused. “But we can move floor tiles and stuff up here just fine.”

“Well, we were trying to move weapons that probably belonged to the armoured corpses. What if they were imbued with qi when they fell?” she guessed.

“Huh, that could make sense, if the qi is frozen away… but why can we move the bodies?” Sana muttered.

“Well I dunno about you, but we didn’t exactly test this rigorously down there, did we?” she pointed out, a touch more tartly than she intended.

“We poked around the edge of the square and really it was only the bodies, some of which did shift a bit, and the weapons, which were immobile, that I noted along with a few other oddments. I could see all of them being quite important down there, being assembled to watch an execution and all in the company of those young nobles and the villain fellow.”

“…”

Sana grumbled. “Fine, fine, I know, I know. We didn’t really poke about because it was creepy, I was just saying.”

“Yeah… sorry… this is no less creepy in its own way,” she apologised for her frustrated tone, taking in the currently rather sunny street.

Almost as an afterthought, she eyed the arborundum blade in her hand. It was about a third of a metre long and rounded out at one end, making for a convenient handle. The long edge was also wickedly sharp for about half its length. Eyeing the rest of the floor tile, she used the leaf to pry out another one. The middle designs were nowhere near as sharp due to the shape. The one at the far side had been damaged somehow; taking it out, she could see a long crack running down the middle, which was disappointing. Speculatively she tried to cut one of the other leaves but the two just scraped off each other and left no marks. Quickly she looked back through the other tiles, in case there was another in the same style, but her hopes were thwarted.

Shaking her head in disappointment, she went back to the corpse with the most ornate armour, the one Sana had originally tried to smash over the head with a floor tile. Kneeling down, she slammed the point of the leaf into his skull with as much force as she could. It effortlessly sheered flesh and with a tiny hint of resistance pierced the skull beneath. Drawing the blade sideways, she sliced the man’s head almost clean in half. Compared to the horror of what she had witnessed inside, it was really nothing much at this point. They certainly didn’t deserve to be left a whole corpse for their crimes in any case.

“Golden Immortal!” Sana hissed in shock from beside her, staring at the exposed golden sheen of his skull and the golden tinted blood that was flowing sluggishly from the cleft skull.

“Or something like it,” Arai found herself nodding “Could be higher, the arborundum damaged the bone but there was a faint hint of resistance, although it could just be my strength that was lacking.”

Curious, she sliced off his arm. This time, with a proper cutting motion, there was no resistance at all.

-Maybe I was just inelegant before, she thought to herself.

“So clearly they are somewhere between maybe Golden Core and Celestial Venerate, whatever that really is, so that’s only the whole span of known cultivation realms above us that this lot might have been,” her sister remarked with dark amusement.

“Heh… Yeah…” she said, laughing a bit at that. “As amusing as it would be to stab all these corpses to see if any aren't as high a realm as this one… doesn’t seem a lot of point, really.”

As an afterthought, she wiped off the arborundum leaf on the corpse's embroidered cloak.

Looking at their own rather scant garb, which was mainly a spare light robe salvaged between the two of them and their spare shoes, she contemplated cutting up a cloak or two, but in truth, she felt ill just looking at these people. The idea of using some of their garments made her skin crawl, given what they had likely done. Sana seemed to have no apparent interest in that either, so after a quick check of the rest of the contents of the two carts in case there was another arborundum-inlaid tile with a piece that could be used as an additional knife, they moved on empty-handed.

It was a somewhat circuitous route, in the end, to eventually make their way to the plaza beyond the blaze. The winding streets of the inner city seemed to have been mostly secured before whatever happened in the lower city, which was a bit odd, she thought, but there was no way to answer that riddle so she just shelved it. The streets were mainly full of corpses put on display, or dead looters. They checked a few more carts and such, but it was all things like statues, carvings, some plants and a few other oddments. Without storage talismans, none of it was worth even looking at.

The main plaza of the upper, or inner city, wasn’t much better than the lower one. Someone had gone to great lengths to impale a very large number of corpses onto lances and display them in various fountains. Most of those dead appeared to be soldiers from what she could see. Others were hung in macabre fashion from pillars of what had clearly once been some kind of memorial garden. The whole thing was smashed and burnt, statues warped or melted, grass scorched and trees reduced to charcoal. Barely any vegetation intruded, probably because of the fiery conflagration behind them, which twisted in the act of beginning to spiral up to the sky.

It was a small consolation to see that there were just as many corpses of the invaders strewn around. The inconsistency between those who were collapsed to the ground and those who were running or frozen in the process of falling wasn’t something she had worked out yet, unless it was just down to a fractional difference in the cause of death. Had those who were fallen all died to the maelstrom of Yellow Springs water while those stumbling had succumbed to whatever else happened to freeze this place outside of reality as it seemingly was? Certainly, most of those who were on the ground were unmarked beyond the misty grey embers and sense of distortion around them. They might as well have had a heart attack and keeled over for all the damage they showed.

“It’s odd,” Sana frowned, looking about.

“Everything about this place is odd,” she pointed out.

“Haha, yes, very true, I walked into that one,” Sana grimaced. “However… have you noticed? This place is huge… All the attackers overseeing the execution in the grand square are dead. As apparently are the ones looting, or patrolling, or in the central plaza back there. But there are nowhere near enough corpses of the defenders to account for everyone who could have been in the city being dead. This place should have had millions of people in it; it’s bigger than Blue Water City. Did whatever happened only happen to the attackers?”

“Maybe…” she frowned.

That had, on a certain level, been bothering her a bit too... not that she had been counting corpses up to this point and they had explored what amounted to a pathetically small portion of the city itself.

“Then again….” she glanced down another street that led off the plaza and shivered, glad she had nothing else to vomit up at this point.

“The density of corpses in the subsection we have gone through has been fairly high….”

“Even down below though…” Sana said, frowning and staring at the sky. “Even there the civilian deaths seemed to be disproportionately people fighting back or older folks… or kids, now that I think about it.”

“Huh,” she said, looking around.

Sana was right, those here were disproportionately either older, people with some element of beast blood in them, or combatants. An ugly thought emerged in her mind, even as Sana finished her own train of thought on the matter, which as it turned out was the same as hers.

“If you were going to enslave a city, you wouldn’t bother to keep the people that aren't worth anything or who are going to make problematic slaves.”

“Well, they do seem to have been in the process of taking everything else of value,” she said, suddenly sounding as drained as she felt.

“Slavery…” Sana stared up at the sky… “This is a horrible place... I liked it better when it was just reality-warping mists and inevitable starvation. Even that thing that nearly killed us on the first day here was better than this.”

“I wouldn’t go ‘quite’ that far,” she muttered, shuddering involuntarily at the memory of that horrible cold and the sinister feeling of the shadow limbs in the mist.

“Okay, maybe not, but certainly this is a horrible place, unlike anything I ever want to see again,” Sana sighed.

Sitting down on the edge of a flowerbed, she let her thoughts recover some kind of equilibrium.

“What… if…” she paused, stopping her thought to think through it again

“What if what?” Sana asked, turning to her.

“What if we have fundamentally misjudged the set of events here,” she said suddenly.

“How so?” Sana said a trifle sourly.

“Okay, so the wave of Yellow Springs water and the execution below killed a bunch of people. Possibly the whole city, but the scene below is kinda odd. Don’t you think the red-robed villain doesn’t actually fit in very neatly with what is going on there?”

“Now that you mention it,” her sister said pensively.

“Right, and his position is weird. What if he… and a bunch of others arrived later?”

“You think he was trying to undo the damage? And the others were cleaning out anything valuable, with the city having been suddenly written off because of it?”

“It’s a reasonable hypothesis,” she shrugged. “I can’t claim to be any grand strategist or scholar in this regard, but if a bunch of eminent young nobles came here and made a huge fate-thrashed mess, wouldn’t a senior or two likely end up coming here to check on what happened?”

“So what… the city gets sacked, then it gets consigned to the Yellow Springs, then some time later, maybe a few hours or a day, some seniors show up, get sealed by that staff, and then everything got frozen like this?” Sana mused, also sitting down on the edge of the flowerbed.

“Yeah. This kind of carnage doesn’t happen in a few hours.”

“Very true,” her sister said dully, staring at the ground.

“Clearly, there was either some attempt at reinforcement of the city, or the Springs didn’t slay everyone….though I don’t think we will ever know the answer to that, if it’s even worth knowing.”

“Yeah, our goal is to get out of here, not worry about how this fate-thrashed nightmare place came into being.”

“There is something in this though,” she groaned, drumming her feet on the ground. “It’s staring me in the face and I just can’t see it.”

Falling silent, she started to run through things again in her head.

-Most of the corpses are a few hours old.

-They clearly had some time to loot the city.

-The time freezing effect, or whatever it was, clearly occurred at the end.

-The battles in the lower districts must have happened after everyone was killed by the water, but that doesn’t really make sense in the wider context.

Sighing, she turned to stare at the distant… school…

Standing up, she squinted at the distant buildings that she had been assuming were the academy along the mountainside, and then looked up the slope. Now that she thought about it, their style wasn’t quite the same. The scale was big, but they looked more like an extension of the city's inner district, or another district added at a later date?

-There was no pagoda, and no clock tower, she realised belatedly.

“We assumed that the city and the great school were right beside each other. But what if they’re not?”

“How do you arrive at that conclusion?” Sana glanced over at her.

“On the first day... That huge reconfiguration we witnessed, you remember it?” she said, spinning around to look up at the mountains.

“It was hard to forget…” Sana pointed out.

“There was a city shown… but it wasn’t associated with the great school or the buildings above.” She gestured to the grand buildings rising above them in their red and white brick.

“These buildings were really confused and mashed together several times. We assumed they were part of the great school, but what if not all of them in this style are? The city was at the head of the valley. The great school, on the other hand, had that huge clock tower and grey building on the mountainside, the pagoda and the red and white buildings with multi-coloured roofs were between two mountains and felt like they were set back somehow?”

“I… I guess?” Sana frowned.

“The buildings over there have roofs the same colour as half the rest of the city,” she pointed to the distant buildings. “And there’s no pagoda.”

“Well, it could be obscured?” Sana suggested.

“It was huge. It was as big as the palace up here. Bigger.” She shook her head, refuting that idea. “Not to mention the visibility, despite it being overcast, is actually pretty good, the cloud isn’t low at all.”

Turning to the building behind them, on the edge of the plaza, which was a vast edifice of marble with a great domed roof, she pointed at it.

“Let’s climb the side of the building here. We have the endurance to manage it and the outsides of the buildings aren't warded that we have seen.”

~ Sana – Evergrove ~

In the end, it took almost an hour to scale the side of the building and arrive at the upper crest of the dome. On the way up, Sana had a lot of time to reflect on her sister's rather skittish set of deductions to arrive at the conclusion that the academy wasn’t, in fact, a mile or two to their presumed south-east. It wasn’t that she doubted the conclusions reached; it was just that she found herself wondering what the point of it was. Exploration was a means to an end, yes, but their end goal was still to get out of here. Worrying about how stuff happened felt more like a distraction on a certain level. Interesting, yes, but in the end it wasn’t as important as the deductions regarding this place most likely being a part of some higher realm.

Sat on the top, she did have to admit that her sister’s guesses had been right though. While the visibility wasn’t quite as good as they might have hoped, there was clearly no pagoda and the complex beyond the far walls seemed more palatial... and also had a giant boat rather inexplicably crashed into part of it. Something about that felt rather familiar, but just like the red-robed villain below, it was hard to place.

“We have greatly underestimated the size of this place, haven’t we…” she said, eventually.

“Not only that,” Arai said, sitting down on the edge. “You were tracking the stable points in the valley? They were always there, right? And the wall gate... door… where we entered, what if it’s another stable point?”

“That doesn’t feel right,” she shook her head. “The other places all had some oddity… the tree had its weird pile of very deliberately placed rocks and the strange golden flowers… the circle of 12 stones had its strange carvings of animals. The three stones had its second ring as well. The shifting stones were clearly odd. But the gate is just… a gate?

They both pondered for a bit in the morning sunlight…

“The sign,” her sister said suddenly. “It was really odd and out of place, don’t you think? And the scale of the wall wasn’t quite what I remembered. I don’t know why I didn’t think it odd at the time… maybe it was the shock of seeing the wards…”

“I guess?” she mused. Something about that didn’t feel quite right, though.

While she was mulling it over in her head, she munched on another spirit fruit, offering one to Arai as well, who took it gladly. They ate in silence, replenishing a bit of lost energy and looking down at the city.

In truth, she really agreed with much of what her sister was saying, the question that was nagging at her though was a much older one, that she had stopped really bothering with once the checking of the points became more displacement activity for her woes than any actively necessary thing.

She had been wondering for quite a while now if they had fundamentally misunderstood something about the structure of this place. Their brush with the terrifying collapse and that weird series of nightmare moments just before it, that were so hard to recall in any detail, only further cemented that suspicion. The skipping of places, the rearranging of the landscape, and that first… early…

She leant back and looked up at the mountain above them.

A few seconds later she had to resist the urge to hit her head off something.

-Really, she remonstrated with herself.

-Sis was right, it was right in front of us all along, hidden in plain sight in the mountains themselves.

“I think I have it,” she said simply.

“You do?” Arai said, it apparently being her turn to sound the dubious sceptic, not that she cared.

“You said that it was staring us in the face, the reconfiguration on the first day!”

“Yes, the academy is clearly not—”

“Nonono… this is the old one. Remember what we talked about… oh... when it was summer?”

Based on her sister's rather blank look, she clearly didn’t, which was perhaps fair as a lot had happened since then.

“Okay, what if we have fundamentally misunderstood how the landscape is changing up to this point?”

“Go on?” Arai said, holding out her hand for a second spirit fruit.

Passing one over she sighed and leant back again. “We assumed that the landscape was shifting a bit, especially in winter.”

“Ahhh… we assumed that the landscape was moving about within the area we were in, right?” she muttered.

“Yeah… all the evidence pointed to that…” Arai agreed. “That’s not exactly a revolutionary observation.”

“Yes, but we were thinking small, thinking about the valley. How many days have we been able to see the mountains in their entirety? It was autumnal, then winter and cloudy, then snow, then everything was haze and in spring we had other things to worry about.”

“Okay?” her sister nodded, pensively.

“Take everything we know to this point, and the new observations about things being mashed through each other in here, and the rather disturbing set of scenes from when everything broke like a badly fired pot… and consider it from the viewpoint of our most paranoid selves for a moment.”

“Uhuh…” her sister said, narrowing her eyes.

She could nearly see the gears spinning as Arai raced towards the same conclusion she was now at.

“Well... What if we have always been able to see mountains because we were always in a valley?”

Before her sister, who had just opened her mouth with the light of understanding in her eyes, could interrupt, she went on “But it wasn’t always the same valley!”

“…”

Her sister opened and then shut her mouth a further time, then finally just took a big bite out of the fruit and motioned for her to continue.

“So, what if, as I said before, we fundamentally misunderstood something? It just clicked, looking at the mountain and the red and white palace over there.”

Closing her eyes she thought back to the conversation between Elaria, her mother and the other woman… Iseult.

“Remember the conversation on the last day? When Elaria called those other two women all the way out there to that circle to discuss her project with the symbol?”

Swallowing her mouthful of fruit, Arai nodded. “I do.”

“Elaria called it the 'Gate' to the 'Dreaming Path' or something like it. What if those points, the circles, the tree… were not fixed in a single place? What if they were always moving? What if they were in fact really hard to find before this place ever collapsed?”

“Uhuh, I see how that can work,” Arai nodded, “But there are a few, err… holes in that.”

“Yes, but just let me finish,” she said with a wave of her hand.

Turning to look back up across the valley, she considered it as she continued speaking. “What if the circles and the tree and the shifting stones were always a feature of ‘a’ valley, but back then were not all the ‘same’ valley? The river moved every time, the hills changed, the treelines shifted and so on, the buildings moved.”

“Look over there.” She pointed down at the valley where they had come from. “It slopes up towards the interior, right? We went through the gate and appeared right in the middle of a plaza that didn’t connect to the gate. What if this is actually a really big mountain range, and every valley in the whole place is stacked straight on top of each other?”

“Oh….Ohhhhh…” Arai’s eyes widened in shock as she followed the last threads of their logic through to its inevitable conclusion.

“When we were on the tree, what we saw was the reality of what remains. What if everything else is just memories or something like it, what if… those are like formation flags, and we are currently lost in a vast formation, threading between the realities of different flags? One anchored to the tree, one to the shifting rocks, one to the circle of three stones, one to the circle of animal rocks.”

“One for the sign…” Arai said softly.

“Exactly, the sign always has a gate near it and was in a valley. Broad brush strokes, but never quite the same picture twice?”

“And that extends to the city,” her sister said quietly. “No wonder we couldn’t make sense of what was going on.”

“Probably yes, I bet many of those events are orphaned within the structure of the city itself. We saw fragments of it in the darkness I think, the scattered streets... a broad boulevard with trees… ruined buildings and whatnot.”

“Except, here does feel slightly different, more stable maybe?” Arai said pensively, looking down at the city.

“That could be because of the events, or whatever the stable point here is?” she guessed.

“That staff… spear weapon… in the plaza… did it seem at all familiar to you?” Arai said after a moment.

“Uhuh…” she frowned and thought back, visualising it…

-Black blade, dark wood, kind of plain, the tassel… the set of bells.

“The sword that Elaria was swinging, did it have any defining characteristics?” her sister added.

“Oh.”

She felt a bit silly for not seeing it before, it was obvious when you put the two side by side in your mind’s eye. Sure there were a few grey areas, plain utilitarian weapons being what they were. However, that degree of coincidence at this point seemed kinda unlikely. The two weapons’ blades could have been cast from the same mould and ingot.

“She bowed to the circle of twelve animals that time when they walked past it,” she said absently as other bits of the puzzle slotted together.

“…”

“She did,” Arai agreed, “The others thought it was a bit funny, but she was very serious about showing respect, not to mention the three stones was something she knew a lot about. What… if she has some connection to the yellow tree and the shifting stones as well? In fact, I’d bet you spirit stones that she was also the one who made that sign.”

{You two are really smart…}

She screamed and nearly fell off the roof ledge.

Spinning around, she saw a red-haired man with a bushy beard sitting nearby. He wore a grey and white robe and sturdy boots. Around his neck was a chord holding seven copper bells that stood out in some way that was perplexingly eye-catching.

{You’re not quite there, but yes, those places are touched by certain ancient things, so they have remarkable permanence in this place, which is why the vestiges of it are anchored by them.}

“Wh…what are you?” Arai asked, shocked.

{I’m the bell on the spear you saw, in the square where you left offerings for the spirits of the unjustly killed.}

“A...Artefact spirit?” She managed to stammer out, her mind racing.

-Definitely a Dao Weapon – just as we guessed.

-Also... it speaks Easten?

{Reliquary Manifestation actually, but it’s basically the same thing from the perspective of a cultivator like you.}

“So… she made you? That lady Elaria?” Arai asked carefully.

{Ah… Hmmmmm, not really, no, she has a connection to the Khakkhara staff though, we are brought together by happenstance in a way.}

“So…. erm... What is this place?” Sana asked “You said we weren’t quite right…”

The man sighed and looked out over the city. At this distance it was still resplendent in the sun, defying acknowledgement of the horrors within.

{Young ones, you need not fear me so, I mean you no harm. Although I am sorry that my appearance like this surprised you; truly, had I intended it you would never have made it through the gate into this place.}

When he spoke again, he was a bit more muted, and to her surprise started to speak in the formal imperial tongue instead.

“You may address me as ‘Senior Heaven Shifting’, or perhaps just ‘Daoist Heaven Shifting’ if you wish.”

She nervously bowed to the old man and offered him greetings. “Junior greets Senior.”

Arai also bowed warily, repeating the greeting and salutation.

“Heh… so polite. Really, I do not stand on much formality.

“As to what this place is, I think it is best to call it a vestige of a living nightmare. Perhaps it was fitting that it was buried like this, but who am I to say that truly, I am not a scholar of karma.” He turned back to look at them both and for a second they saw something close to eternity reflected in his eyes.

"Honoured Senior has been stuck here that long?" she asked as politely as she could.

"Stuck here...? Ah, you are misunderstanding because I am speaking in your common tongue. I am familiar with its roots, that is all, mortal language is little barrier to me."

-So he is indeed a part of this place, assuming he isn't lying, she wasn't sure if that made her more or less concerned though.

“This city was once called Evergrove. A fitting name perhaps. Still, neither its connection to the Everkind family, nor the Bel clan, could save it in the end. I decided to accompany the founder of this city in ancient antiquity. We warred through the heavens together and when he set off on his great voyage, I decided to stay here to see how mortals lived and study mortality amongst them. In a sense, they saw me as a guardian for their descendants I suppose, although I had no such ordained task beyond my own sense of duty to my old companion's folk. Perhaps that was their flaw, in the end. Their arrogance in their roots got too big for the reality they found themselves in. Now this place is a tomb for the city's Young Lady. A perverse memorial to the greed of those fools who dug so deeply beneath these mountains…”

“The Lady Marcella…?” she asked.

“No. Halla Everkind, a princess of this land. She didn’t die in the square. They held her to watch, intending to kill her at the last, but in doing so forgot an ancient maxim. Ones such as them rarely consider the cost of overcomplicating things and in the process inadvertently provided some opportunities to others to make their last moments count in ways they could not deal with. When that villain, as you called him, arrived in the aftermath, he tried to seal her, at which point the evil done here became apparent and they were buried with the dead. That sparked off the calamity that buried this place.

“Her tomb is that blaze of golden soul fire you see below.”

They both stared down at the twisting maelstrom of golden fire.

“The deaths in the square were a different kind of insanity. The zealotry of those fools of the successor generation damned everything that desecrated this place, which is perhaps fitting. If they had just made prisoners of those here, held them for ransom or imprisoned them for a few centuries, I fear much of this mess might have been avoided.”

What ‘this mess’ was she wasn’t quite sure, but the implication seemed to be that it was related to the ruin of this place and how it ended in Eastern Azure Great World.

The bell spirit shook his head wearily. “Instead, to make a statement, they executed all of those who came from the Eternal City at the Empress’s behest to teach and instruct. Marcella, Raleen, Amara, Marius…”

With a mocking laugh, the old man spread his arms and went on. “Let not the Heretic to live, they Declared. Behold the 'Glory' of God in the highest form, Salvation to the Unbeliever through Death...”

The way he said the words made something in her soul tremble. It might have been her imagination, but the symbol, so quiet in her mind’s eye, now shivered faintly and shared a tiny sliver of… anger at that? It was gone almost as fast as it arrived, such that she might have thought she imagined it.

“A grand statement, seeking to build prestige among their peers. They were warned by others, even their own advisors, but they did not believe. Had I been here at that time I could have prevented it, but already events had moved too far.” The old man sighed.

“As a result, those fools are buried here, in a punishment hell of their own devising. Their karma, and that of all those who stormed this place, brought its ruin and sold its people, will be forever stained by the curse their desire brought forth. Their desecration of an ancient treaty and the death of Marcella Junia, a Daughter of the Midnight Court, offended a power that should never be crossed. They called upon a god to smite a heretic, little believing that the god that came would see only evil souls who revelled in broken oaths and drown them as a votive offering for the unjustly deceased.”

“The Yellow Springs…” Arai shuddered.

“That… Lady Marcella has some connection to the Yellow Springs?” she spoke the words, not really believing them, despite what this old man, the bell spirit, was claiming.

“The Yellow Springs are an aspect of the same whole, yes. The Lady Marcella indeed has a connection with it. An acknowledgement of sorts both through achievement and blood. They paid a truly dreadful—”

“Entirely deserved…” her sister muttered under her breath.

The old man laughed at her inadvertent interruption.

“Indeed! An entirely deserved one as well, the price for their ignorance in daring to consign her soul. They would have fallen anyway, with what was occurring at the Academy itself. But still, because of their greed and ignorance, they managed to 'save' themselves from this place by delivering themselves to judgement for their crimes beyond even the reach of the ‘God’ they endlessly claimed to be doing deeds on behalf of. Ironic really, it gave that heroic young girl, ever in the shadow of her peers, the key to influence their ruin in a single desperate gamble. Sacrificing her own future to see all theirs ruined. That they never foresaw it was due to their own mediocrity, no Prince or Princess of the Holy Empire would ever do as she did. Though we arrived too late, thanks to their meddling and everything fell to ruin… we buried so many old evils with us in these hells cast of broken dreams and mortal nightmares that the price was almost worth it.”

The old bell shook his head, his laughter strangely ringing to her ears in its mockery of the misfortune of this place.

She was still trying to process what he had just said, while worrying about what this evidently powerful weapon spirit was actually intending, for whatever good it would do, when he fell silent once more.

“So… err… why have you come to speak to us, Honoured Senior?” her sister asked eventually.

She nodded as well. All they could do was ask, it seemed. “Erm… does Honoured Senior want us to free you from this place or something?”

“…”

“Free me…? Haha...”

The old man stared at them for a long moment and then started to laugh as if this was some great joke.

She sat there on the edge of the dome, sweating from nervous uncertainty, as he guffawed and wheezed at their words like it was the most hilarious thing he had ever heard.

“Er… Honoured Senior, we didn’t mean to offend...” she mumbled, worried now in a different kind of way.

Wiping his eyes, the old man shook his head wryly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you, it’s just such a funny thing to ask, even though I can see you are both earnest and well-meaning.

"No. I do not need freeing from this place. I do not fear eternity…”

His voice grew deeper suddenly and more strident. “I am the tombstone chaining one of those old scammers. It gives me nothing but joy to see them languish in torment, wasting all their stolen potential in this place, able only to wait for the inevitability of their true deaths far from their master's golden hypocrisy. It is the very least they deserve. Sadly, while my eternal companion in this endeavour is a charming individual, she is not the most gifted conversationalist, while I have always been someone who enjoyed talking with others. That said, she would probably claim I am a chatterbox who is far too fond of pointless things, who seeks to steal from her portfolio by words alone.”

The old spirit smiled wryly. “No… we do not need or desire to be freed from here. Eventually, this place will return to the origin and we will leave then."

"Return to the origin? Honoured Senior?" she asked, curious as to what he meant.

"Hah... it will collapse into nihility when the world this place is snagged on finally succumbs to the Heavenly Dao, then we will leave."

She stared at him dully, not sure what to say to that.

“When you speak of ‘chaining’… Honoured Senior? You mean that villain in the red robe?” her sister asked, changing the topic away from the rather awkward route it was diverging towards.

“Yes, the villain in the red robe. Do not dwell on that waste, best he is forgotten by all. He came here intent on seizing a ‘precious’ seedling for his lord, and to extricate those fools. It was his deserved misfortune to be buried for his sins by me, who arrived too late to prevent this disaster,” the old man shook his head, now sounding sad.

“Then why seek us out, Honoured Senior?” she finally mustered the courage to ask.

He sighed and eyed them both dubiously.

“I was impressed by your reasoning, in part. You showed respect where most would have fled in fear, and you didn’t covet either me or my companion. You made offerings for good fortune where most would denounce and you saw truly the mask of horror in this place, yet still tried your best. Mainly though, I just wanted to talk to a living being once again.”

She stared at the old man, completely unsure of how to respond. Her sister’s face was also a mixture of subtle, warring expressions. Panic, concern, fear, surprise, uncertainty.

“I said before, I do not fear eternity. My duty is a truly noble cause, to be the chain that seals one of those deceivers, but aeons without anyone to speak to but the staff on occasion and his constant whinging about his plight, it is just a touch tedious. So humour this old man his conversation, heh?”

“…”

“Anyway, you heard this old man reminisce a bit, so it’s only fair I reward you a little. And anyway, it’s that old scammer’s power I’ll corrode to do it, so that’s even better...”

The spirit laughed for a full minute, seemingly deeply amused at this.

On the other hand she, and also from the looks of it her sister, were still utterly off-balance as to what in the fates was even going on here. While she was still running through that problem the spirit, if that was what it was, wiped a tear from his eye and sniffed a touch theatrically.

“Ahem… yes, anyway, to return to the original point, your logic is broadly correct.”

“That everything is scattered and stacked upon itself, Honoured Senior?” she asked, as much to buy time to think as for any other reason.

He raised an eyebrow at her and inclined his head as if amused. “Yes, those are all places that anchor this place in various times. The past locations were somewhat mythical, with the exception of the tree. Places that could not be easily sought in this land and tended to only come unlooked-for.”

“But you said that we were not quite there, Honoured Senior?”

“Mmmmm, yes…. I wonder. Your logic led you to this point, but the pair of you are remarkably self-effacing compared to most of your kind I have met. Even your wisest sages have a streak of ego a mile wide and ten thousand leagues tall, from which they pronounce on the Dao.”

She stared blankly. On the one hand that sounded like a compliment, but the backhanded dismissal of most cultivators as egotistical felt… well she agreed, but it also felt a bit…

-Is he suggesting that we, or the act of transforming ourselves, also did something to the same effect? A part of her thought, feeling that that was also a bit…

He stared at them both with a look of faintly amused, or perhaps jovial, consideration and then sighed.

“Well, it is what it is. The rippling distortions that went through this place… were dimension quakes. The aftershocks of another… event… of sorts. Somehow, this place considered you two as something like fixed points as well. While you would have died in other circumstances you are afforded a remarkable degree of autonomy within here. Even this old bell has no idea how you managed it, that kind of thing requires touching some old and esoteric means…” he trailed off, staring at them both pensively.

-Uhoh, her instincts twisted, nervously.

That gaze wasn’t malicious, far from it, it was merely considering, but beneath it she felt uncommonly exposed all of a sudden. As if he were trying to stare through her, see everything about her, past as well as present. She was aware of the symbol shifting subtly in her mind. She had almost forgotten it was there, but now its absence was even more unobtrusive. Her mantra shifted faintly of its own accord. None of her qi or anything moved, it was all pure intent, which made the feat more remarkable in its own way. At the same time, she became aware of a faint separation of inner and outer thoughts, as if her thought process itself was being concealed in a subtle way. External confusion remained.

-You’re hiding my thoughts from him?

She was suddenly glad that the mantra was doing its own thing very efficiently and all of its own accord. The symbol symbolled faintly, suggesting somehow that this wasn’t because of danger as such but because of convenience more than anything else. To be known in this way would be ‘bothersome’. It took her a second to work out why this confused her. ‘He is not the only thing in this place that might be watching.’ was what was being communicated very faintly.

“Ha,” eventually, he gave up and chucked dryly, shaking his head with a smile, then continued rambling on, speaking as much to the world at large as to them it seemed.

“Perhaps it is just good fortune, your attainments are good for your realm and you have survived to this point. This old seat has seen enough of the inner workings of karma and good fortune to know when to step forwards and back, not to mention some big sisters will get annoyed if I poke and prod, talentless as I am.

“I am guessing you wish to get out of this uncreated patchwork of nightmares and broken dreams though,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“…”

Clearly their expressions must have spoken much on that regard because he sighed and clapped his hands to his knees, shaking his head like an old elder.

“Honoured Senior Heaven Shifting… If…”

“It will be tricky in this place… perhaps this is karma though… or an opportunity… who knows.”

“Honoured Senior, you mean we are…” she really didn’t want to say… ‘stuck’.

“Did this old man say that?” he chuckled.

“I only said it will be tricky. This old man has a certain prestige, ancient and long-forgotten though it may be in the ashes of this place.”

“I had thought to give you a certain thing… but perhaps a more tangible show of my appreciation is in order. This old bell can indeed deliver you out of this depressing mausoleum of human depravity and at least send you to the end of the path.”

Before either of them could say anything, he waved a hand, and they were standing back in the square. The old man was gone, and they were stood next to the impaled red-robed villain on the dais. It took all her control to retain her composure, and it was probably in no small part thanks to the still subtly shifting intent of the symbol on her mantra, that she didn’t flinch or scream in surprise.

“I apologise for bringing you young ladies back to such a horrible scene, but I cannot separate parts of myself while remaining true to my goal, so I must ask you both to grasp the haft near the bell.”

“…”

{Seriously… Just Grab The Damn Handle.}

It sounded mildly exasperated suddenly, and its words sank into their minds in a weird way. The symbol made no move to stop the effect, although she got the distinct impression it could. Intuitively, part of her understood that the bell was exploiting some kind of loophole in something, or obfuscating something... somehow.

As such, her and Arai’s hands moved of their own accord and grasped the handle.

{+ CONSUME +}

A majestic male voice, unlike anything she had ever heard, rang in her mind like... well, like a bell. The symbol shifted subtly, drawing the essence of her and, she realised through a subtle link, Arai, away from its strange and deceptive lure. For a split second, she had a terrible nightmare that it was all a trick, that the bell had dragged them here under false pretences, and it was all to this moment. Then she saw black cracks suddenly radiate out from the wound inflicted on the red-robed villain as he creaked in a most disturbing way. The bell shivered soundlessly and the staff grew fractionally warmer beneath her hands.

For a split second, somehow, his gaze landed upon her, upon them, looking at them with hungry if mostly mindless eyes. Some part of her body experienced a faint tug... her other hand had reached out towards the man? Her sister, still holding the arborundum leaf, had done the same. With horror, she noticed that the leaf itself poked the chest of the man and didn’t cut the cloth of his robe.

Everything snapped back to normal as the red-robed man shook faintly.

{Tsk. Thing, you really deserve this.}

The words didn’t come from the bell, they seemed older… more ancient if that was possible. The spear-staff? Except it wasn’t a spear anymore, not really. Now it really was a Buddhist staff with a blade on the bottom.

A world-crushing sense of derision came with the voice, collapsing into the red-robed man from the staff. The bells shook, simultaneously along with the entire nightmare space reverberating again to a sound she couldn’t hear. Frozen as she was, within her field of view the bodies chained within this place; the young nobles, the soldiers fleeing, all screamed soundlessly as if their torment had just intensified. The grey misty fires around them did intensify, visibly.

-I was right, she realised dully.

-It’s not just spray from the waters that sis saw, there really IS a grey fire there, hidden in the shadow of other things.

Watching now, the faintly increasing intensity of the grey fire was somehow related to their torment. The red-robed man groaned faintly as the resonance, that never touched them, bore down on him in its entirety. His eyes grew dull, and she swore she could hear the sound of his flesh twisting and bones cracking. Fresh blood trickled from the wound, and then from his eyes, nose and mouth, while his flesh turned a touch greyer than it had been.

The moment passed, and they stood there holding the staff as if nothing had ever happened. Only her memories, shielded by the symbol, and the sweat slicking her body told her it had really happened.

“Sorry about that,” the bell muttered, sounding genuinely sorry. “There is a certain… procedure… to that that is a little awkward.”

"W-what... is that fire?" she managed to stammer out.

"It is enough for you to understand that it represents the inevitability of punishment," the bell said after a considered pause. “Anyway… no harm done. Don’t fear that some ill will come of it.”

They both eyed the bell dubiously. It was all very well for it to say that…

It chuckled. “Even if you spoke of it, or it spoke of you, she won’t let anything intrude on this place of punishment.”

By ‘she’, she assumed he meant the staff. The voice had sounded slightly feminine, but that could just have been her sense of projection as weapon spirits did tend towards being female in aspect more than male.

“In any case, it seems that it was a success,” the bell said with a sigh.

“…”

They both looked at it in silence, unsure of what to say.

“Honoured Senior...” she started to speak, only for the bell to cut her off with a nostalgic sigh.

“Fair maidens… I bid thee adieu on your journey.”

In that instant, there was a sound like the dull strike of a bell in a tone that wasn’t quite right.

{{{*CLANK*}}}

The sound seemed to travel through them and distorted the entire scene around them. The symbol shifted slightly and started to draw in qi suddenly even as the city collapsed away around them into the mist. They hit the ground hard and felt grass. and leaves. For a split second, she thought they were back in the valley, until they looked up and saw the familiar sign over their heads.

“...”

“Ey… Robin, what the hell is this!” a man’s voice called out. “Is it anouther buncha students playin the lig?”

The one who was presumably Robin replied from somewhere further distant. “Ey Miss, you okay? You look… kind of like you just fell out of a….”

“Oops… not quite…” the rather awkward-sounding voice of the bell rang in her ears.

{{*Clonk*}}.

There was a further faint intonation of a distant bell.

...

...

The world distorted again and there was grass underneath her, damp in the morning dew, an unfortunate reminder that while she was clothed, she wasn’t that well clothed. Sitting up, she stared around. They were indeed sitting by the sign. The wall was the much smaller one that she remembered from before. The gate itself was open and the whole place looked weirdly abandoned, in a slightly rugged kind of way. Visible beyond it were leaf-strewn lawns and overgrown flowerbeds in autumnal colours. Looking around, everything looked as it probably should in a somewhat abandoned and overgrown ruin in the forest. Above the walls, the large weathered buildings sat hunched in the morning mists in reds, greys, dusky yellows and white stone.

The pointed roofs, sweeping eaves and strangely styled arched windows lent it a somewhat forlorn and timeless aura. Amid the spiralled columns were hundreds of strange statues on the sides of buildings; many looked like devils or demons, others were mystical beasts or men and women wearing armour, there were even trees and a few constellations. In the distance, a towering pagoda rose, adorned with mythical animals. Just visible around it were smaller ones, their tops peeking through tall trees visible through gaps in the mist. Above them on the mountain slope, rising amid the high forest, was the great grey fortress with its tower and strange circular array set into it with dozens of shifting circles.

Whether for better or worse it seemed, that mysterious bell had indeed delivered them to the entrance of the school.