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The fortress was vacant.
They had not strayed far from the gateway chamber, yet Hump could already feel it—an absence so complete it pressed in on him. There was no life here. No movement. No presence lingering in the air. Dust lay thick across every surface, undisturbed by wind or footstep. No banners stirred from the walls. No birds circled above. No distant murmur of voices.
They had emerged onto an outer wing of the fortress, high within a tower set into the outermost wall. Just beyond the doorway, a narrow staircase led downward, hugging the inner side of the wall. It was the only visible access point.
Hump frowned at that. There were no wide gates or grand entrances leading inward, just that one narrow staircase. Whoever had built this place had not intended for easy movement between its layers.
Stepping out onto the battlements, there was no breeze. The air carried the stale scent of age and stone, like a house long abandoned. It was wrong. A structure this exposed should have been lashed by wind, yet nothing moved.
Hump wiped away the dust to reveal stone that was dark blue, almost like slate, but with the rough texture of granite. He stepped up to the inner edge of the wall and gazed down. There was nothing between him and the drop.
The street below was littered with skeletal remains, scattered in clusters and lines where a battle must have been fought. Most still wore armour, the steel dulled with time but still intact. weapons lay where they had fallen—blades, spears, shattered shields. For nobody to have claimed them after all this time spoke of an emptiness beyond anything Hump had witnessed.
The streets were vast, wide enough for entire armies to march through in formation. They led to another wall deeper within the fortress, its base lined with immense iron doors—each one tall enough to admit even the largest altari.
Beyond the wall, more layers rose. Walls upon walls, each higher than the last, forming a ten-tier defence that climbed toward a central keep. The inner structure had hexagonal walls crowned with towers at each corner. And at the very centre of it all, an indigo tower rose tall like a blade of jewels piercing the sky.
“Look at this,” Celaine said.
She leaned over the battlement and peered out at what lay beyond the fortress. Nishari had her from feet on the wall beside her and was looking too, her tail whipping back and froth.
Hump and the others joined. The wall dropped away for what had to be a hundred paces, its surface lined with all sorts of defences. Arrow slits covered almost the entire surface, but there were defences that Hump had never seen elsewhere. Large, gated openings led to platforms with mounts clearly designed for weapons far greater than bows, or with space to stand.
The stone was scarred. Great blackened streaks cut across it, as though something had burned its way down from above. Patches of stone had melted and run, hardened into warped shapes. Elsewhere, deep pitting marked where something corrosive had eaten into the surface. Long gouges began halfway up the wall and dragged downward like giant claws.
Between the damage, faint lines ran through the stone—thin channels, like veins or runes, branching across the surface. Most were dark and inert, but a few still held the faintest glimmer of dormant essence.
And beyond it all, there was nothing.
No ground. No land stretching outward from the fortress.
Far below, past the shattered defences and the drifting edge of the structure, there was only empty blue.
“What purpose could such defences serve?” Dylan asked.
“It’s like they’re trying to protect the wall itself,” Bud said.
Hump pointed at one of the platforms. “I imagine they would have been shielded with magic—some sort of one-way barrier perhaps. People could stand in their with ranged weaponry and shoot down any attackers.
Dylan let out a slow breath. “But there’s no land to lay siege from. What’s it meant to defend against?”
Hump didn’t take his eyes off the sky-facing walls. “Demons don’t need land. They come from the sky in rifts, from anywhere they please. This place wasn’t built to defend against a conventional army, but to hold back whatever lurks in the abyss.”
“And to slay whatever tried to get inside,” Celaine said. “Nobody builds platforms outside a wall to defend a place. Those are for killing.”
His gaze lingered on the broken channels in the stone, and the dead channels that must have once hummed with essence. Not just the walls, but everything.
“Just imagine what it must have been like in its day,” Hump said. “This entire fortress must have hummed with essence. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the greatest magical creation we’ve ever witnessed—an entire fragment turned into a magical fortress. I’m not even sure the Maker’s Tower compares.”
“Raises the question though,” Celaine said. “What could be capable of destroying a fortress of this magnitude?”
“Uvdar,” Bud said. “The Fallen God. Who else but him?”
“Where do we go from here?” Dylan asked. “If this is Heaven, I’ve got to say, powerful magical fortress is great and all but it’s a little disappointing.”
“Perhaps this is what guards Heaven,” Emilia said. “If we make our way into the keep up there, perhaps we’ll find out answer.”
Hump’s eyes roamed the ten tiers of walls.
“That’s a long way to go with an army of demons in pursuit,” Dylan said.
Hump started toward the stairs. “Then we better get a move on.”
***
They moved quickly through the streets, passing through the remnants of the ancient battle, preserved in eerie stillness. Weapons lay scattered across the stone—swords, spears, shield—all of fine craftsmanship well beyond what Hump would have expected for an army. Armour still clung to skeletal forms, its surface dulled with time but intact, the metal unmarred by rust.
Essence stones were set in almost everything. All dark, drained completely.
“These couldn’t have been common soldiers,” Hump said.
“Common soldiers wouldn’t guard the gods,” Bud said, stooping to pick up a fallen sword. He gave it a few experimental swings
They moved through the street. Almost every piece of weapon or armour was of fine craftsmanship, embedded with essence stones that were now completely drained of essence but must have once been splendid. “This equipment rivals that of silver rankers. Surely only the gods would have the wealth to arm such a large force like this.”
“They would need it,” Celaine said. “These monsters were powerful. Look at this thing. I can still sense the essence in its bones. Not sure how confident I am that I could take a living one alone.”
The corpse of the enormous creature lay collapsed across the street. its skeletal remains fused into the stone where it had fallen. Its bones were thick as pillars. It might have once resembled a dragon, if not for the absence of wings and the unnatural proportions of its skull. Its jaws were wide, lined with jagged teeth, frozen in a final snarl.
The stone beneath it had melted. Acid burns scarred the surrounding walls.
They didn’t linger. So far, nothing had moved against them, but the deeper they went the less Hump trusted the silence. This place had been built for war, with layered defences and complex magical formations. If anything still functioned, it would be closer to the centre.
Celaine was ahead of them, moving with practised caution despite the pace. She advanced lightly, eyes scanning every angle, bow ready. Hump followed just behind, his staff in hand, searching for any hidden runes or traps with Spirit Sight.
The first gate came quickly. A massive iron structure set into the inner wall, its surface scarred and partially torn open. Whatever had struck it had not bothered with finesse. The metal had been bent inward, warped by force or heat, leaving a jagged gap large enough for a horse to pass through.
Beyond it lay another district. The layout was similar, with broad streets and stairs leading up to the walls, but here the shadows of the walls were lined with buildings, clustered together beneath looming stone. Hundreds of them. Homes, shops, barracks. Many had collapsed, but a few remained complete.
They didn’t stop to investigate the people that might have lived here, maintaining a pace no ordinary man could have, weaving through debris, fallen structures, and the bodies of two armies. Even at such a speed it took them five minutes to reach the next gate, where they passed through and continued climbing upward through the tiers of walls, following sloping streets.
Each gate was breached inward. In places, they had been shattered from the very hinges. And it was not just the gates that were broken, sections of wall had fallen too.
The inevitable happened shortly before they reached the keep. A red crack tore across the sky. Blue turned to blood. The colour spread unnaturally fast, as though the fragment itself were being stained from the other side. A wave of foreign essence poured through the fracture.
“There it is,” Dylan murmured.
“Sooner than I expected,” Emilia said. “They must be working faster to catch us.”
“We should—” Hump stopped talking as essence stirred. Channels in the streets beneath their feet flared to life, pulsing erratically with pale light.
Then the fortress was reacting.
Essence surged through the ancient lines in fits and starts, as if the system were trying to remember how to function after a very long sleep. All around them, dust trembled loose from stone. Far above, the tower at the centre of the keep began to shine with the blue light of pure essence—the same blue as the sky, Hump realised—glowing like a beacon. With it came another pulse of essence, this one stronger, spreading through the air like a shockwave.
“What in the hells was that?” Bud said.
“The fortress is reactivating,” Hump said.
“Any idea what it does?” Emilia asked.
“With any luck, it slows the rift,” Hump said. He activated Spirit Sense and watched the surging essence stream outward from the keep. “I think the power source is in the keep. Maybe we can use some of these old defences to buy us some time.”
They crossed the grounds of the keep at a run.
The keep stood at the highest point of the fragment, enclosed within hexagonal walls and corner towers built on a scale that made the rest of the fortress feel modest. Even here the defences had not held. Two of the towers lay in ruin, broken open and slumped inward. The other four still stood, scarred but intact.
They entered through a collapsed door to find a narrow entryway that led into a grand hall. Balconies looked down over the hall from above. The walls were lined with murals, depicting beings he didn’t recognise.
Tall figures with blue skin and four arms, armoured in styles unlike anything from Alveron or the Remnant Realm. Some carried curved swords and spears in all four hands. Others were shown bearing the severed heads of their enemies. In several images, their own heads were animalistic—hawk, wolf, serpent—while in others they wore golden haloes behind their heads like crowns of light. Many were depicted riding dragons or great scaled beasts into battle.
“They look like gods,” Hump said, studying one towering figure holding a spear in one hand and a chain in another. “But no gods I recognise. Not even from the other continents.” He gazed around. “Actually, nothing I see here looks like the Pantheon.”
“I don’t understand,” Bud said. “Why would they be here? None of this makes any sense.”
“It’s possible the people that built this worshipped different gods,” Dylan said. “Or perhaps the same gods represented in a way more similar to them.”
“I didn’t see any four-armed skeletons on the streets outside,” Bud said.
“We can find our answers once we have a plan to deal with Karlac,” Hump said. “Keep moving.”
They hurried deeper. The channels in the floor were brighter now, converging toward the centre of the keep. They passed through a door in the rear of the great hall where a pillar rose up in a chamber at the centre of the keep—the indigo tower.
The walls were filled with runes that shone with essence, but Hump didn’t recognise them. Not alveronian, god glyphs, or Loften’s runes. These were something else.
“I can’t make anything out of these,” Dylan said.
“Me neither,” Hump said. “All I can tell is that they’re directing essence to the top of the tower.”
“There’s a door here,” Emilia called, having rounded the right side of the tower. “Or rather, the lack of the door. Looks like some sort of control room inside.”
Hump rushed and looked through the opening to a chamber filled with artifacts. Mechanisms moved. Runes were alight with power. Channels of essence lined almost every inch of the chamber walls, yet in places, there were gaps. Places where essence didn’t reach. Runes that didn’t quite activate, or where the essence was lacking.
“Can you do anything with this?” Emilia asked.
Hump’s eyes roamed the unfamiliar runes. The Book of Infinite Pages didn’t react. “I have absolutely no idea.”