The holy Temple of Fire in Emberhold had never known silence like this.
Most of the priests were gone, fled into the civil war that consumed their empire. The great braziers had burned low, their smoke curling toward a ceiling that no longer felt sacred. Only the portal apparatus remained, humming with unstable energy, its connection to Hadron pulsing like a diseased heartbeat.
Koronos stood before it, the Sword of Otepi in his hand. He could feel the prison planetoid on the other side: ancient, waiting, hungry. The portal would work. It would take them exactly where they needed to go.
It might also kill them all.
He looked at his companions. Corvannafax stood silent and ready, her crystal sword strapped to her back, Her face carved from the same stone as the desert mountains of her birth. Daggeroth, the young Samiran but unflinching, his bow strung, his eyes holding a fear he refused to name. And Shelove, a giant black pantera, pressed against his shoulder, warm and solid, his animal friend.
No more waiting.
Using the Sword's resonance with ancient magic, with the memory of Otepi herself, Koronos reached into the portal and forced it. The apparatus screamed and giant red glowing crystals began to slowly move, rotate and twist. Lighting arced through the sanctuary. The few remaining priests began to pray on their knees and threw themselves prostrate to the marble floor. Reality buckled. The air tore open into a swirling spherical vortex of violet and black, a wound in the world that led to the heart of darkness.
"Stay close," he said. "Whatever happens, stay close."
They stepped onto the dais.
The sphere of pure energy engulfed them, and time stopped.
There is no word for what came next. The edge of the Void is not a place. It is the absence of place, the space between spaces, the nothing that holds everything together. They hurled through it, scraping the edge of nothing, touching the boundaries of what should not be.
Time became meaningless. Moments stretched into eternities; eternities compressed into heartbeats. They were falling and flying and dissolving all at once. Although they have traversed portals before, this was entirely different; so much power that it distorted their local reality, their very fabric of what held them together. Koronos must concentrate or it will tear them apart, and this is why nobody uses the portals anymore.
And the whispers came, then the screams.
They crawled through minds like worms through rotting fruit. Temptations. Regrets. Fears given voice. Koronos heard Otepi calling his name: not the distant goddess of his visions, but the living woman, the one whose sword he carried, the one he'd never met and would never know. Then Supremus insanely laughing, the sound of a universe dying. Then the screams of every man he'd ever killed, every life he'd ended in war, every ghost that followed him through the years.
Corvannafax's expression only conveyed emotional pain, she would forever wander the cosmos as an outcast, alone.
Daggeroth curled into a fetal position, his mind shutting down, retreating into some deep place where the whispers could not reach. His lips moved, forming words no one could hear. A prayer. A plea. A goodbye.
Shelove's presence in Koronos's mind flickered like a candle in a hurricane. He felt her fear: not of death, but of dissolving, of losing herself in the static between worlds, of becoming nothing more than a memory scattered across the edge of the Void. The bond that held them together was agony, too much input, too much raw power overwhelming her animal mind.
Hold on, he thought at her, pouring everything he had into the connection. Hold on to me.
He gripped the Sword, using its light as a focus, a thread to follow through the madness. Otepi's blade. The only thing that felt real in this place that was not a place. He shouted for the others to hold on, to stay together, but his voice was swallowed by the void.
Glimpses of dead worlds flashed past. A planet of frozen oceans, its surface cracked like broken glass. A city of crystal shattered into dust, its towers still standing but empty, forever empty. A sun going out like a candle, its light winking into nothing.
And then…
They tumbled out of the place that was not a place, gasping, choking, onto solid ground that should not exist. The portal sphere disassembled around them with a sound like reality closing its jaws. And time started again.
They were on a floating fragment of a shattered realm. The ground beneath them was a mosaic of crystal and stone, veins of raw majik pulsing with sickly green light. Above them, a sky of impossible colors: deep violet, burning gold, sickly green swirled around a distant sun.
Hadron. The prison planetoid. They landed in an ancient holy site from before the shattering, now nothing but ruins and memory. Koronos lets out a silent sigh of relief because he was hoping they wouldn't land in Supremus's throne room or something, he thinks to himself, 'but it makes sense, there's likely powerful wards in place to keep that from happening.'
Before them stretched a forest of crystalline plants that sang. Not with voices, but with vibrations, a constant dissonant hum that set teeth on edge and crawled across the skin. The air crackled with hostile magic, pressing against their lungs, their souls, the very fabric of who they were.
Shelove's form flickered. One moment she was solid, the next translucent, her edges bleeding into the strange light. She made a sound. It was not a growl, not a whimper, something between and Koronos was at her side instantly, kneeling, pressing his forehead to hers.
I am here, he pushed through the Bond. You are here. You are Shelove. You are my friend.
He poured his will into her, his identity, his certainty. He reminded her of who she was, of the hunts they'd shared, of the battles they'd won, of the warmth of the sun on their faces back in the green realm. Slowly, agonizingly, her form solidified. Her eyes opened and met his.
She was still afraid. But she was there.
Daggeroth stared at something only he could see. His eyes were wide, unfocused, fixed on a point in the singing forest. When Koronos touched his shoulder, he flinched, then whispered, "There are things here. Watching. They know we came."
Corvannafax already had her sword drawn, scanning the treeline with the practiced eye of a warrior who had survived too many ambushes to ignore her instincts. "Whatever they are, they can wait. We need shelter. Now. The plants are singing in patterns. It's not random. Something is controlling them."
A sound came from the crystal forest. Not an animal. Not wind. A presence.
Koronos reached out with his Everliving senses and felt it: vast, ancient, aware. Something was watching them from the depths of the singing jungle. Something that had been waiting a very long time for someone to arrive.
He stood, helping Shelove to her feet. Her form was solid now, but her eyes held a new wariness, a new understanding of the dangers this place held. He looked at his companions, battered, terrified, but alive.
"We're not alone," he said, gripping the Sword. "And whatever's out there knows we're here. Move. Now."
They moved.
Behind them, the crystal forest sang on, and something ancient opened eyes that had been closed for ten thousand years.