Lilith found herself in the gloom of an endless space. No walls, ceiling, or ground of any kind. As weird as it was to conceptualize, the space felt like... nothing. As if it didn't exist beyond her consciousness, leaving her to wonder if she'd somehow fallen asleep.
The only thing that was obvious—she was no longer inside the Sanctum of Xomreus. Her body was still there, seated on the stone bench with the Noble standing over her with the wicked dagger in his hand, and yet she wasn't. It was as if her mind had broken off from her body.
Back in the real-world Cleo was in trouble. Somehow, he'd found her. The realization and reoccurring habit was more comforting than she could've imagined. A comfort undermined by his emotional pain. It was so vast and potent, the guilt had followed her to wherever she was now.
A mad cackle cut across the space to interrupt her thoughts. It surprised her. There was noise, and it shocked her to discover an old man kneeling a few feet away. Where had he come from? Why was he here?
His body looked broken. Limbs sickly with knobby joints and prominent veins, though he certainly looked healthier than the Nobles on their thrones back inside the Sanctum.
Thick chains and manacles wrapped around his neck and arms held him in place with large iron spikes that were bolted to the floor. She would've called the ground stone, but the ground didn't really exist in this place. Each time he moved, the chains twisted, constricting a little tighter and bringing him ever closer to the ground.
His loud laughter had dispersed and disappeared into the empty space, making her conscious of the fact that there was no echo. It was a muffled void, similar to being buried deep underground. Even the rattle of the chains failed to have an effect.
Feeling an itch, she had a sudden urge to look down at her hands to make sure she was still free of restraints. The fact she could see at all—that she could see her body left her stunned. Wherever this was, light and the ability to see, technically, did not exist here.
"What is this place?" she silently asked herself.
The fact she existed had allowed her to be seen. It was the same as the man in his chains. She didn't know if that was how it worked, but the precept felt natural, almost familiar.
"No need to be scared," said the old man once he stopped laughing. He shifted, jingling his chains to show he couldn't go anywhere. "Welcome to my sanctum," he added with a fair bit of sarcasm.
Except for a long, curved nose, a wide mop of gray hair obscured the rest of his features. Lilith didn't trust the friendly words. Not in a place like this with a man chained to the ground. A closer look revealed there were scars covering his body. Jagged horrid lines that healed poorly, leaving behind lines of lighter skin that stood out amongst the rest of his body.
His clothes, tattered and stained, appeared to have once been quite fine. Velvets and silks, the slacks and coat could've belonged to a king or a wealthy merchant. The rich red and golds had fallen victim to several decades of weather and wear. Lilith tried to ignore the violent holes in the coat's shoulder and gut that suggested something terrible might've happened in the past.
"Who are you? And where am I?" Lilith demanded, surprised by the force employed in her own voice.
"Questions when I should be the one questioning you?" said the old man like he thought the whole situation was one big, elaborate joke. "You, the one free to wander the world? Mostly, I'm surprised you don't already know the answers. I'm the spirit of this island. I've gone by many names over the years. Long ago, I was once treated like a god. These days, I am considered more of a resource to be exploited. Chained as I am, I'm honestly surprised I can even speak, let alone affect or change my lands at all." He jiggled his chains to make a point. "And you may call me Asher, though I fear I may no longer be suited to that name." Reference to the name left him surprisingly emotional, like he might start crying or laughing. The two seemed deceitfully similar on Asher's obscured face.
"Asher, I still don't understand," Lilith said. "You called this place your sanctum, but where are we? I can feel... myself, in two different places. Am I dead?"
"Ha!" Asher said. "Not dead. Quite the opposite. You are a lush garden in the middle of a desert. And this place, it lies between worlds. It is a product of ourselves and the world that binds us, and before you ask, no, I did not bring you here. You came here yourself. For what purpose, I do not know. Maybe you wished to poke fun at the spirit who had lost his way, though it could be a product of those foolish Nobles, for they know not the powers of which they meddle. They are children playing with candles in a field of dry tinder."
"I would never make fun of you, oh noble spirit," Lilith said, moving closer to get a better look. In her rush, she failed to keep the pity from entering her voice.
Asher shied away like he expected her to strike him down. To see such a reaction from someone like him—Lilith was nearly overcome by a fresh wave of anger. Who... why would anyone ever treat someone in such a manner?
Relying on a bit of intuition, she reached out to touch the chain that was wrapped around his neck. As soon as her fingers brushed the surface of the crude metal, the chains and manacles began to glow a white-hot until they disappeared altogether.
Freed, Asher stood up. The gray mop of hair fell back to reveal a hard face, marked by scars and age. A wicked smile stretched across his face. Wide, manic smile, he tested the strength of his legs and arms. Squatting and swinging his arms, he flexed to make sure everything still worked.
"You have given me a magnificent gift. Thank you," he said. "Now leave this place before you are caught in my fury. I may be old and worn, but I still have a few tricks left up my sleeves. I will bring an end to the Nobles. Farewell, little one. May the winds forever favor you."
Lilith nodded, though she didn't know what'd happened, his release was a mystery, and before she could respond, the gloom receded, returning her to the Noble's sanctum.
She was still on the strange bench with the Noble standing in front of her. Everything was just as she'd left it. An enormous statue in the background, and a half circle of seemingly lifeless Nobles seated upon their thrones. The minutes spent with Asher had taken place inside the span of a single heartbeat.
Lilith couldn't hide her frown and disdain. Speaking with Asher combined with the state of the deteriorated Nobles provided a bitter perspective. It was both worrying and edifying when added to the betrayal from her mother.
"What happened?" Phelan demanded. "I am... cutoff. What did you do?" His livid voice took on an edge of desperation. "I demand that you answer me!"
Doing her best to ignore him, Lilith stood up to walk over to Cleo, who was on the ground holding what appeared to be Marius's deflated corpse. A visual that might've seen her running and screaming if she hadn't already been inundated with nightmarish realities. Beyond the nightmare realization of what the skin meant, she couldn't help but refute the visual. Seeing the old captain dead just didn't seem right, and this... He'd always seemed so powerful, so sure. In her mind, nothing should be able to kill him. But here he was, void of his consciousness, and what had happened to bring him to such a state? It was a tattered piece of skin, almost like he'd shed his outer layer.
"I'm so sorry, Cleo," Lilith said. "He was a good man. I know how much he meant to you." Her words sounded hollow to her ears, but following her brief meeting with Asher, it was all she was capable of right now. Truth was, the out-of-body experience had left her disconnected, like she wasn't fully herself.
Cleo woke from his daze. He roughly shook his head, then leapt to his feet. In a moment of selfishness, Lilith half hoped he would embrace her like she'd seen Boulder and Cassandra do occasionally, when they thought she wasn't paying attention.
Instead, his grief vanished, and he was back to his stony self. Vacant and hard as ever. His body was a mess of wounds. Most appeared to be on the mend, thankfully.
She looked at his face again and flinched when she saw his eyes were glowing a bright green. The visual horrified her. Like he was losing the part that had made him human.
Being this close, she could feel the piece inside of him that did not belong. An infection, a cruel twist in the natural order, so to speak. "Is this my fault?" she whispered. Placing her palm flat against his chest opened her to the wrongness. Touching him and seeing his reaction, she understood a part of the problem. She would need to undo what it was she'd done.
Breathing in, she reached out mentally and watched as green veins appeared on his skin. They were centered on her hand. Slowly, a liquid mist passed through his skin and back into her body. Her blood returned, and the green faded from his eyes.
He collapsed once it was all over. Scared, she reached down to feel his chest. His heart pulsed weakly, and he was still breathing.
"So," Phelan said from in front of the stone bench. He'd been unable to move his failing body since he'd reached that position. He appeared to be bubbling with anger. "I-I wish you could've restrained yourself. Giving someone the blood of eternity should not be undertaken lightly. Certain protections need to be in place, and to waste it on such a—useless creature. People aren't all the same. I wish that woman would have trained you better, though that might've been asking too much. You can still fulfill your destiny! Work with the Nobles so we can usher in a new age. A new world! Together, we'll save my nation! MY PEOPLE!"
Unsurprisingly, he seemed to wait for an answer, but before Lilith could refuse, the ground began to shake in earnest. A rumble deep within the earth that seemed to shake the very foundation of the entire Noble palace. Dust and bits of stone fell from the ceiling.
It seemed Asher had delivered on his promise. Suddenly, his warning that he would bring an end to the Nobles clicked. They needed to get out of here. Now. Bending over, she shook Cleo by the shoulders, "Cleo! Please wake up!"
No response, and she'd never be able to carry him. Searching the Sanctum would be a waste. The empty concrete dome had nothing of use. No carts, nothing to help carry his large body.
They were running out of time. The ground shake was steadily getting worse. Harsh tremors made standing all but impossible. Lilith stumbled, and fell to the stone floor repeatedly, trying to hover Cleo's unconscious body. The dust continued to fall as the tremors grew worse. It soon became clear the structure would collapse.
She was all too aware of what an earthquake could do. If they didn't find a way out of the palace and maybe away from the island, the ocean was going to swallow them whole. Her time spent on the island of Two Mounds had shown her how bad things could get. They'd barely escaped that disaster, and they'd begun their escape on the beach near the shore. If the earthquakes were at all similar, she didn't see how they were going to reach the coast in time. After all, Gholand was huge. They were miles from the coast. "Please, Cleo. You need to wake up! I can't carry you!"
"What is going on?" Phelan asked in response to the ground shaking. "Listen, girl. Give me your blood. Now! My city needs me. Hurry! This world needs me! I am the Forged Empire! HURRY! GIVE ME YOUR BLOOD!"
Lilith did her best to ignore and block him out. His screaming continued regardless. She'd dropped to her hands and knees to avoid toppling over. The jostling was worse than the deck of a ship during a hurricane.
Cracks formed across the floor. On the other side of the room, the raised arm of the four-eyed statue broke free. The split happened at the elbow, sending the massive piece of stone tumbling off the knees to shatter on the floor. The neck then snapped, and the head rolled off the side of the shoulder, colliding with the back of the dome. Destruction left the space as a cloud of dust and debris. Lilith continued to bounce up and down as her teeth rattled. The jarring motion made it hard for her vision to focus. "Please, Asher," she begged.
Desperate, she started crawling along the floor until she accidentally touched the side of Marius's deflated arm. The sensation she received jolted her whole body like an electric shock. He should've been dead. How could she feel anything? Then she got an idea.
Finding Phelan's discarded bone-hilt dagger, she slit the tip of her thumb. Then she smeared a line of green blood across Marius's deflated forehead. The response was almost immediate. His body exploded into a red mist. A thick, hazy cloud had formed in the middle of the Noble sanctum. The vapor then spread along the floor until it filled a third of the enormous space. Lilith didn't know how to interpret it. Her actions, or the vapor, and least of all—the coloring. Not that she'd expected the outcome, but a piece of her had assumed the color would've been green.
The shaking continued as various parts of the dome ceiling broke off. A piece of ceiling smashed into the center of the room where it flattened several of the motionless Nobles in their rotten thrones with the sound of smashed eggs.
Cracks shaped like lightning bolts split the walls and floor into different sections. The crevice next to her widened to the point she could not cross it, not without something to bridge the gap, like a ladder or rope bridge.
As the seconds ticked onward, the destruction only got worse. To the point, escape no longer seemed possible. The floor was slowly becoming a fractured mess. A frozen river in the midst of a sudden thaw. Lilith's small section was an island in a sea of destruction.
A stream of rubble and dust broke free from the ceiling overhead. Lilith moved to use her body as a shield for Cleo. A couple of small rocks clipped her shoulder and one on her lower back, but nothing large enough to cause severe enough damage beyond the superficial. The act of removing her green blood from his system had left him unconscious longer than she would've thought. Had she ruined his ability to heal? Perhaps the decision had been a bad idea given their current predicament.
Hovering over him, she noticed the tattoo on the inside of his wrist. The thorn encircled cross was glowing red, which was the same color as the strange mist.
At first, she took the roaring to be part of the destruction. Then a flash of orange light appeared in the middle of the red mist. The coloring was the same as a blast of fire, and then the mist began to gather into a particular, larger than a fifty-foot sailboat until a massive, three-toed foot stepped out. The foot, as thick as a tree, had black scales for skin and talons longer than her entire body attached to each toe. As the toe flexed, the sharp talons tore chunks from the stone floor. It was like the foot was testing its strength or the integrity of the stone.
Then the rest of the body formed, a long tail, neck, and four legs, all connected to a reptilian torso and dressed in the same black scales except for the belly, which was ribbed in gray. The body shifted forward on a set of powerful legs with a weight that could still shake the stone floor through the continuing earthquake.
Lilith gasped as the head of the massive reptile reared back. There were two horns on top of its head, and one small one on the end of its long snout. The teeth were massive and interlocked, each tooth had to be as large as her armor or longer.
Wind erupted throughout the hall, forcing her to cover her face as air buffeted her like a severe storm on the high seas. She worried the sandstorm had broken through the walls until she spotted two massive webbed wings rising out of the red mist. Connected to the creature's back at the shoulders, the wings beat furiously in an effort to raise the massive torso to its full height. The wing span had to be longer than the creature's whole body, tail included.
Such a ferocious creature. Lilith was caught in a mix of awe and terror. The strength of such a monster could crush her like an ant, and yet, the warmth emanating from its body transformed the massive space into a cozy, stuffy campfire. A winged serpent... It was a Winged serpent? Lilith suddenly realized where she'd seen one of these before. The tattoo on Marius's chest! The creature he'd called dragon.
"Marius?" she yelled, ignoring her inner warnings. If it wasn't him, inviting the thing's attention could very well lead to her becoming a meal. She was slowly realizing that anything was possible—this world... From pirates to islands filled with bat-like monsters. Life didn't make a bit of sense.
Funny enough, she realized her worries were for not when the dragon turned to look at her. The massive neck curved around so the head could look at her. The motion revealed the color of its eyes. A pupil with a feline shape, and the iris—the iris carried a familiar golden tint. The same golden tint of the man she'd met on that fateful day after being rescued from her mother's ship.
Lilith was struck by an overwhelming sense of relief. Despite the foreignness of encountering such a creature, she felt soothed by proximity.
"Marius! It is you!" The overpowering sense of surprise caused Lilith to choke. She couldn't stop smiling. It left her feeling like a fool, but she didn't care.
In answer, the dragon emitted a steady purring noise from deep inside its throat.
The Noble Phelan continued to make a noise in the background. Unlike the rest of his comrades, the vindictive old man had survived the falling debris, though his robe was torn, and his skin and scalp showed a handful of bloody wounds from the falling debris. His eyes were so insanely wide, Lilith could no longer tell if he even had eyelids. "Listen to ME, whore! I will destroy you! You stupid..."
His words cut when the dragon opened its mouth to release a deafening roar. Out shot a geyser of fire that washed over Phelan's body in a blinding glare. The blaze had enough momentum to cross the entire sanctum where it struck the bottom of the massive statue, leaving behind a large scorch mark. There was enough power in the fire to draw comparisons to a tornado.
As for Phelan, after seconds in a fiery inferno, all that remained was a lump of burnt flesh and a bit of melted stone. Thus, came an end to the reign of Phelan Monmouth, first amongst equals, Savior of Gholand, and Champion of the Forged Empire.
Lilith did her best to ignore the stench of burned flesh as she worked to blink away the glare that had imprinted on her vision following the inferno. Right now, she needed to focus on their escape.
The earthquake continued despite her prayers to the contrary. Large sections of the floor had collapsed, leaving the sanctum's interior uneven and impossible to cross.
The dusty ground had gained a substantial tilt. Before she even knew what was happening, Cleo's unconscious form began sliding toward a gaping crevice that had opened on the floor. There was no telling how deep the hole had become.
Lilith leapt forward, sliding on her stomach to snatch his wrist before he disappeared. She was rewarded with a mouthful of dust and rocks roughly jabbing her chest, but she caught Cleo's extended arm and slowed his progress in time to gain a secured grip. There he hung, over the edge of a bottomless cavern.
Her grip began slipping as the seconds ticked onward. The muscles in her arms burned and her shoulders threatened to rip from her sockets. He was too heavy. Not only did she lack the strength to pull him to safety, she didn't have the strength to hold on for more than a couple seconds. "Cleo! Please wake up!" she pleaded as she watched her fingers slip free, one by one.
She had no recourse but to scream in frustration as he fell from her grasp. But before he'd gone more than a few inches, a massive black-scaled paw appeared to scoop him up. Relief flooded through her body, sapping her of a momentary strength. And when a second dragon claw scooped her up as well, her scream was restarted anew.
The way the scaled hand held her aloft, the image was comparable to a person holding a doll or tiny humanoid creature. Unusually warm, the scaled appendage's grip was surprisingly delicate with its grip. Smooth and hard as iron, the surface of its skin was smooth and soft to the touch. This creature, this dragon, was completely reminiscent of the tattoo that had been on Marius' chest.
If escape was what they were after, then their goal would lead them back toward the entrance. Past the statues and vaulted ceiling, only there was one problem. Marius, in his current form, would never fit. What were they going to do?
Her worry proved unnecessary when Marius stood up on his hind legs. The massive torso of the reptile extended, elongating its wings. Tail to head, he had to be at least a hundred feet long. He pointed his snout upwards as he held them against his body.
Marius began flapping his wings, creating a minor dust storm inside the sanctum's domed space. Lilith's hair momentarily obscured her face. And then she felt a sudden whoosh of movement that sent her stomach to her feet. It seemed that Marius had taken flight.
Up they went. Each beat of his wings created a thrust that made Lilith feel lightheaded. In a rush, Marius broke through the stone ceiling and burst into bright daylight. The transition hardly seemed to impede his momentum in the slightest.
Outside, they were greeted by an overcast sky. The reality of Gholand's harsh pollution came back in a rush of wind and foul smelling smoke. They were free of the Nobles, their sanctum, the earthquake, and in seconds they were high enough to be on top of the weakening sandstorm and its dying, inconsistent wind.