You are taking a severe risk, coming to find me. What your ancestor did has not been forgotten here. But I suspect you know that. I also suspect that is why you are here. The sins of the parent inevitably compounds during the time of their children.
But just as well. I cannot lead you down the same path that your grandmother descended—I refuse, as this world cannot suffer another transgression as such.
But perhaps there is something else I can provide.
Know this, Veronica Chandler: Sometimes, power is its own prison, and in the face of that, absence can be made into a sanctuary.
—Udraal Thann to Hero-Representative Veronica Chandler
VIII-31
A Sanctuary Named Absence
“My family tree’s all kinds of jacked up, Veronica,” Shiv mumbled with a shudder. “Are you sure that my dad wasn’t from Udraal? Because if you tell me he’s my grandpa and mom at the same time, I’m going to hurl.”
“He was not,” Veronica slurred, bouncing off the rightmost wall three times before she backhanded the stone—as if it was the one slamming into her. Walking a straight line had become a Legendary-Tier task at some point, one that defied even her capabilities. As she battled her way away from the fireplace, she nearly toppled over her table, folding unnaturally at the hip to keep herself standing. “Shiv. The chair. Get the chair.”
“What—What do you mean, get the chair? You want me to grab the chair?” Shiv blinked as hard as he could. It made sense to do so. After all, his other muscles were all too tense and inflamed, and so it fell to his eyelids to squeeze the spinning room shut. At least, that's how things made sense in his mind. Per his Shapeless Tides, he should have been strong enough to clench the entire room, still using only his eye folds alone.
Nihilist: I don't think that's how words work, but I'm not a biolographer, so I don't… What the hell is a biolographer? Ah, I'm drunk too.
“Wait, never mind. I have this.” Veronica cleared her throat and squinted at the chair. “Move!”
Her voice struck the piece of furniture with the full power of her Legendary Skill. The fabric of reality warped and bent. A flood of Animancy pulsed out and caused the room to violently shake, followed by the inexorable weight of her Rhetoric concentrated on so small a space that made Shiv feel like he was standing next to the epicenter of a country-sundering mana explosion.
But this time, he was ready, capable of surviving anything. His body was painted bright platinum in an instant as he pointed his Shapeless Tides outward, like a series of spears bracing for an impending cavalry charge. An immense weight pressed down upon Shiv and Veronica, the tension becoming tangible with power and force. Shiv's Legendary Physicality trembled. Even if one was a High Hero, they would have been ground down to nothing more than a smear upon the floor, for so great was—
A sudden creak interrupted Shiv's thoughts. The chair moved a half-centimeter. Toward the left. Not toward Veronica. She fully collapsed over her table.
***
Approximately a few minutes to a full hour after she finally reached the chair and began dragging it around, making an unholy ruckus as it ground across the floor, Shiv found, to his surprise, that he was unable to lift the stone seat up from where it stood. He was only capable of shifting it from place to place, as if it had been magnetized by a power greater than anything he'd faced before. “Stuck…” he grunted, then gagged on his tongue.
“It's,” Veronica gagged as well and then swallowed a sudden spill of bile. "It's fused the room somehow. Here, let me show…” Her right leg betrayed her, and she bounced chin-first off the wall. Her Legendary Toughness came into good use as she simply shrugged off any risk of Adept-Tier brain damage.
It took a herculean effort on her part to reach Shiv, but as she did, both grandmother and reluctant grandson struggled to figure out their biomechanics together as they pressed the chair against the table several times. Veronica had to mime what she wanted Shiv to do because language suddenly became hard for her. Words slipped her mind constantly. Shiv saw the dense cloud of her consciousness expressed in that translucent accretion disc—though it was broken, sprouting massive gaps and porous wounds, unlike the solid fixture that defined her sober state.
At some point, he figured out what she wanted. There was a series of runic patterns on the throne that needed to be perfectly symmetrical, with their sibling markings carved into the table. Unfortunately, the patterns were moving, shifting from place to place, bobbing and weaving like a skilled boxer. At least, that was how it seemed to Shiv. Veronica fared no better, so they called upon specialist assistance.
“Holy shit, you two are fucking destroyed,” Jessica whispered.
“Legend Hawgrave,” Shiv squealed, pinching his nose to best mimic Veronica's tone. “You have been summoned by the foremost… the big woman of the Auroral Council… to get the lines together!”
Rather than getting angry, Veronica gazed off into the distance and began to giggle uncontrollably, as if Shiv was the funniest person alive.
Jessica looked between the two of them with an expression of disbelief and apprehension on her face. Meanwhile, Kathereine was still trying to reassure herself out of an existential crisis while sitting in front of the fireplace with her head clutched in her hands.
“Look, I’ll help, but whatever it is you’re on, I want to get on the train too,” Jessica bargained.
At that, Veronica lifted the mithril bottle filled with Legendary Hydra blood wine, as if it were a trophy bestowed upon her by God's hand. A true god, not those pretenders, the Ascendants. The true Great One, who had returned from undeath to christen all and bestow upon them their true glory.
“True glory…” Shiv oinked. “What a joke.”
As she was not overcome by a Legendary Drunkeness Evolution, Jessica aligned the patterns in two seconds. Suddenly, the table and chair fused together with a resounding crash of stone on stone. Veins of light spread through the room, yet rather than a flood of mana filling the atmosphere, Shiv felt a sudden rush of coldness rip through the room. Magic was torn out of the room, and what replaced it was an aching feeling of nothingness, the same nothingness that accompanied the presence of a nuclear mechanism, that hollowing entropy which mauled Shiv from the soul outward.
While his expression tightened with discomfort, both Jessica and Veronica shuddered once and offered nothing else as a response. Meanwhile, that entropic agony crept deeper into Shiv, crawling like a creature sporting blades for limbs and saws along its segmented body. It sought his center to roost and rest after hollowing him clean and through.
The rest of Veronica's sanctuary trembled the same way. Soon, the stones began to shiver and rattle. Then, before his eyes, they propagated; they ex-multiplied and bubbled. Square-shaped tumors emerged from the jagged surfaces, bursting forth from the chair and table first, before spreading out in vast tides across the room. They slammed into Shiv, nearly knocking him over, but then learned to curve around his body as they navigated past Veronica and merged with Jessica's armor. He recognized them for what they were in an instant: Inertium, the metal that despised magic, a singing substance that screamed when it greeted mana frequencies.
In an instant, the entire room began to vibrate, coming alive with such vigor and intensity that Jessica's protective shell seemed almost still in comparison.
The swordswoman asked a question, but Shiv couldn't decipher her words, as her lips were wrapped tight around the upraised mithril bottle while she spoke. Veronica, however, understood the Giantsbane with ease. “It's not quite the same as your armor. You'll see in a moment. But you must keep this to yourself, you must, because I said so, and that is the reason you will follow for now.”
Jessica's subsequent shrug communicated her overwhelming indifference.
Then she flinched as the backside of the chair suddenly ruptured open. Veronica took a half-step forward, then plunged face-first through the trembling rift manifested on the back of her seat. As she vanished across the other side, Shiv's pain grew by a magnitude, but he found himself undaunted, following after as he crammed his head and torso halfway through the opening—before getting stuck and requiring Jessica to ram him through with a few well-placed kicks.
Passing through the throne wasn't like traversing dimensions. There was no wave of pressure that washed over him. Instead, the ache of nullified magic only grew, and there was a wrongness to the world he couldn't quite place. Shiv had existed in the phlogiston of magic all his life. Mana, skills, they were a thing so deeply embedded in his nature that even before his first death triggered the activation of his Path, he was still squeezed tight by the System's embrace ever since he was born. As he emerged on the other side of the throne, however, the world was different. Everything was different. Everything was vacant. It was like the Systems had gone out like a light bulb, had been banished, like it was never here at all, like it didn't exist. That was a horrific thing to realize, because it was as if reality itself was made unreal. What remained was a structure born from nothingness at all. The System was. That was undeniable. It sent you levels, it gave you Quests, it bestowed notifications upon you.
Here, everything was empty, and it was silent in a way Shiv couldn't describe, in a way he didn't want to describe, didn't want to understand.
Veronica was but two meters ahead of him, squatting on the ground as she leaned over a stack of shapes. At first, he thought it a strange staircase she rested upon, but as he drew close beside her, he realized that they were humanoid figures, stripped and denuded of skin and flesh, left only with bone that seemed lacquered and coated under a layer of black wax. The same viscous substance continuously dripped off the bodies and onto the ground, which was made of yet more corpses, where it inexplicably formed the same angular shapes and patterns that defined Intertium.
The fluid that covered everything trembled and pulsed in rhythmic intervals, flowing toward the portal, back across the gap. The hole they'd come through wasn't a thing of Dimensionality. It seemed like a wound between places, but it was also more than that. It was like a conduit for infection to spread across. Here was the source of the deposit—one that also felt like the heart of a sickness.
Shiv raised his head to behold a world of calcified bodies. There was no open sky, no emptiness to gaze into. Tens of thousands of the corpses ran on, kneeling upon their fellows with their hands raised in prayer while their eyes faced the ground. Many were partially embedded into the walls, upside down on the ceiling a few hundred meters above, occupying every bit of space available, leaving room for nothing else.
It wasn't entirely dark, however. A dim, pure glow spilled over everything from a point opposite to where Veronica and Shiv had emerged. There, at the end of the claustrophobic realm, a different figure loomed over all others. It was centipede-like from its waist down, but humanoid above that. It mirrored their postures, hands clasped together, and head bowed low. It too was lacquered and mummified, but there burned something within its withered husk: a flame of incandescence. The divine energy within the being was but an ember, enduring in this state of unnatural stasis despite the System's absence.
As Shiv looked on, his drunken mind roused itself, and his intuition found itself stepping forward. Though this place was grim and unnerving, there was also a holy quality to it, a sacrificial aesthetic. People offering themselves in prayer, preserved beyond the point of their death to mark their faith as eternal. At the same time, the god they supposedly prayed to replicated their actions and delivered them back upon them.
“Gods… gods don't do things randomly. Everything significant… has meaning... What's the meaning here?”
Veronica snapped her fingers and turned left before shifting right for no reason and leaning against the last row of mummified bodies. “Good, good. You noticed. There is a… a great significance here. Udraal shared this realm with me—you see, the reason why I met him the first time was that I wanted to become an Ascendant myself.” Veronica hiccuped. “It was a truly silly plan, but I was young and foolish. Barely over a century old. I assumed being a god was the only way I could change things in the Republic and make things better. So I endeavored to do the same thing my grandmother did.”
Shiv stared for a bit too long, and Veronica scoffed. “Which one of your sensibilities have I offended now?”
“Not that.” He shook his head. “I'm just surprised that you think being a century old is young and foolish.”
“Oh, it most certainly is, and yes, before you ask, I do consider you an overactive infant. But there was a time when I might have been more aligned with your behavior than you think. I told you before that I like to be prepared, and I've had my own adventures. Naturally, I was more inclined to use them to serve the Republic. But even so, that took me to places that you wouldn't believe. And while I tried to retrace my grandmother's footsteps, I encountered Udraal at the depths of the Abyss. We fought and… and…” She shook her head, distracting herself from the sentence. “The fight was relatively inconclusive at the time. The conversation that followed was, however, much more enlightening. He can be quite persuasive when he sympathizes with you, and he shared with me after our third debate this… this Unmass.”
“Unmass?” Shiv asked. He faintly noticed Jessica emerging behind them, still sucking on the bottle.
Veronica dipped a finger into the odd, dark substance oozing off one of the bodies she was leaning against, watching the same patterns continue to pulse within the droplet. “He didn't tell me where this place is from, but based on what you've discovered about the Faceless Queen and the Great One's past, it must have been part of their power, part of their soul. It scattered alongside the rest of them. The Unmass… It's like the opposite of a mass at a church. It is anathema to faith, but also to belief, to everything: the final deaths experienced by the people here, followed by their calcification. The deity present, I suspect, holds Domains of Magic or Ends or something that is remarkable or fundamental to the System's ways. They are what caused this. Inertium resists magic because it rejects all narratives. It is a deadening metal. It is a ringing thing that refuses to follow the vibrations of the system's song.”
Veronica licked her lips and stared at the corpses. “Udraal theorizes that they were heretics before they got to this point. And that this was deliberate by design. One among their number managed to become a Demigod, and amidst their ascension, they performed an act that killed their entire sect so that others could start harvesting weapons from their remains, weapons against Divinity, against mages, against the System itself. The substance that seeps off their forms is the rejection of worship. It is a rejection of future narratives. All formed by an act so fundamental, so devastating—a god going against their own Domains while worshiping an act of rebellion against magic itself."
She raised a hand and gestured across the vast, dead space. "At the same time, their worshipers are heretics but also faithful. A paradox of paradoxes, and with it, everything was frozen at that instant. This mummification fused the present as an eternal act of rebellion against the System and one of its…”
“Gods,” Shiv finished. He nodded slowly. “Okay, so Inertium spreads out and activates from anti-faith.”
“Udraal also said another thing,” Veronica continued. “That this might very well be the doing of a Farwalker cell. They deliberately train and recruit people who have been wronged by certain gods into the ranks of heretics, priming them for these operations so that they can create and seed Inertium deposits in reality. From there, they harvest the materials to create mage- and god-killing weapons, instruments that damage all attunements, divine or not. But what I think this which he allowed me to keep is something that has been preserved across time. Most acts of unfaith are simply brief blots upon the world. The Inertium deposits of the Farwalkers are mined, and they do not regenerate. But this place… There is something different about it.”
Shiv wanted to ask Veronica why Udraal allowed her to keep such a valuable sanctuary, but his attention was lured away by another fact: the divine spark within that towering god let out a faint, seeping wisp of substance. A substance Shiv recognized. A glowing, incandescent mist, the very same that spread out from Adam in dense, billowing clouds before the great palm fell.
With that, he noticed another thing: on the backs of each mummy was an insignia. A vaguest humanoid shape sprawled across their backs, with the imprint of a palm hammered upon the top side of their skulls. It was a map of patterns, mirroring stylized fingerprints and more. The god itself was holding its hand out in a gesture, and that gesture suddenly took on a new meaning in an explosive recontextualization. It was not supplication, but a palm held up. Not in an act of worship, but an act of defiance, an act of rejection, an act that raged against the System itself.
Shiv's Continuity Error rattled inside of him as he caught flickers of a vision once of a place long past, filled with people true and faithful and a Demigod before Adam. A Demigod that served as a vessel to a greater god. These glimpses were brief and short-lived, but they smuggled fragments of enlightenment to him nonetheless.
“Oh shit,” Shiv slurred as he drew a line between two likely points of deduction. “I think… I think this is where the shield was. Where the Great One found it. The Sage—the asshole inside Adam. I think this isn’t just some Unmass, it was a sort of… rejection-of-the-System-mass. That’s why the faith thing is still burning there. It’s a fragment of the Tyrant of… of Adam.”
The alcohol left Shiv borderline incoherent, but it also made Veronica fluent in understanding the borderline incoherence. She nodded along as if he was making perfect sense, because he was. Meanwhile, Jessica looked between them as if they were sharing a similar bout of psychosis.
“Right, that would make sense. I've often wondered why the spark of Divinity still burns. Usually, after an act of unfaith, according to Udraal, the spark goes out. It is a destructive thing that destroys laws. It un-makes the nature of the System, and creates a sort of rebellious material in its aftermath. Here, however, the sanctuary itself still endures. The faith endures. This act of significance, this calcification, this moment of frozen stasis and mummification… It’s something else.”
“I think the Great One said something about the Sage making a bunch of people starve. Maybe this was from that, maybe this was its whole anti-statement thing… anti-System thing too.” Shiv burped. “Fucking… this is some weird metaphysics shit. Wait! We don't need to guess! We can just ask the Sage.”
Veronica's eyes grew wide. She turned to Shiv like he was a genius. Suddenly, both of them remembered that the supposed figure they spoke about could be consulted at Gate Piety. She grabbed Shiv by the shoulders and started shaking him joyfully. “Yes… Yes, bring him here! Bring him here quickly. There is much we need to discuss, much we need to know.”
“No, Adam's soul is all cracked. Can’t move? Did a… a…”
“Offended his Domain, did he?”
Shiv nodded.
Veronica mirrored his sympathetic nodding down to the rhythm. “Very common problem. My sympathies. Kathereine breaks herself a great deal as well.”
Instead of moving on to another topic, the twosome just kept nodding, enjoying how in sync they were. “System,” Jessica muttered, swallowing after a full minute of drinking. She looked at the meter-long, still-full bottle in her hands like a long-lost lover. “This is some good shit. I was wondering how you two got jacked up so fast. Wait. Shiv, how the fuck did you talk her into this anyway?”
“I didn’t. She told me to go get the wine?”
Jessica looked like she didn't believe him.
“I did,” Veronica confirmed. As she sniffled, she gave Shiv a pained look. “Tell her.”
“Tell me what?” Jessica asked, squinting with doubt.
Shiv grimaced. “I don't really wanna. We're already miserable enough.”
“That's fine. She's always been miserable as well. She's been that way since… since… since her husband died. She’ll probably barely react to it.”
Jessica’s dubiousness threatened to transform into actual anger. “Alright, motherfuckers. Spit it out. What could be so bad that—”
***
“Holy fuckkkk,” Jessica squeaked. “We’re fucked!”
“Jessica,” Rusty finally spoke. “Give me the wine. I wish to process this with a clouded mind as well.”
***
“Adam!” Shiv cried, staggering out from a dimensional rift with a drooling Jessica riding on his back. “We need to talk with your god shit!”
It might have been minutes, it might have been hours, but by the time Shiv returned to Starhawk's Perch, Adam lay attended to by Isabella, Can Hu, and Rose—who probably got back sometime after Shiv left.
Can Hu flinched, surprised by Shiv and Jessica’s sudden intrusion—but before the Penitent could ask if Shiv was well, he stumbled one foot in front of the other toward his friend while both Jessica and Rusty made horse noises on his behalf.
Behind them, on the other side of the rift, Veronica Chandler lay sprawled, face-down, on the floor once more. A quill remained clutched in her right hand, and she was actively trying to fill a parchment—one that was actively stuck underneath her. As such, she marked and scribbled upon the stones rather than inscribing anything legible upon any of her pages.
Isabella opened her mouth, but made the mistake of inhaling. She immediately choked and gagged, coughing violently as she caught a whiff of that Legendary alcohol billowing out from Shiv’s breath. Rose was less impressed. “The fuck is this?” she asked.
Adam lifted his head slightly and squinted. “Shiv. Are you—”
Uva appeared in that instant out from Shiv, materializing in a burst of psionic mana. “He’s past that point now,” she said. “They all are.”
“Hey, Uva,” Shiv said, pressing his lips together to kiss her head—only to miss her entirely. Twice. “Shit, you’re shaking pretty fast there.” He clubbed her face accidentally. Thrice. Before finally squeezing her skull like it was made of dough to gain purchase on her person so he could plant a smooch on her eye as it bulged out of the socket.
“Yes, yes,” Uva muttered, responding like a cat putting up with its owner’s idiotic antics. “Shiv—”
“We gotta ask Adam’s god-hole a question.” Shiv giggled aloud against her inflated eyeball.
Adam winced. “I would appreciate it if you didn't call it that. I would also appreciate… if you—” Jessica flicked a fast-moving projectile towards his head. Adam responded, his wings flaring bright. He reached out and caught the attack before it could strike his skull and then realized it was a mithril bottle.
“Nope,” Rose growled, snatching the bottle out of Adam's grip before he could indulge. “We're not having that. Three drunk Legends is bad enough.” That didn't stop her from attempting to take a sip. Unfortunately, as she began to lower her lips to the top of the bottle, she froze and realized Uva's mouth had extended a good three meters across the room, doing a full 270-degree turn before coming around like a turning slide to steal a few sips for herself. “Starhawk’s fiery tip, girl,” Rose hissed. “Fucking freaking me out.”
Uva didn’t reply; instead, she focused on drinking herself while wrangling Shiv and Jessica.
“Adam,” Shiv said, proud of how large his tongue was for some reason. “We need you to come with us. We need you to go and see the place… the no-god place. Come with us down the hole. There’s a hole in the seat—”
“This is starting to sound really bad,” Rose muttered.
“It’s not for dicks!” Jessica shrieked loudly and with great cheer. “I mean, it could be, but it's actually just filled with corpses, mummified corpses, and a big Demigod corpse. It's like the least sexy place I've been in… in the last twenty years, and that's saying something.”
“Demigod corpse?” Adam muttered, barely able to follow the conversation.
“Yeah,” Shiv said. “Got a bit of the same spark that you do. And after the whole throne thing, I want to talk with the mist. I want to talk with the shield of the Great One. I want to know some things about Avalon and lots of questions. So come out you… you…” Midway through the conversation, Shiv doubled over and vomited, only for his body to flash gold and his form to suddenly shoot back upright. He blinked and shrugged off his momentary nausea as he smirked in triumph. “Heh, fastest I managed to cast that displacement spell. I moved my throwing up into the future. Someone's gonna get that all over their face… later.”
“One must love Chronomancy,” Veronica groaned in the background.
***
“You’re right, Jess.” Rose blinked as she took in the thousands upon thousands of mummified bodies and the general atmosphere of the Unmass. “This is just about the least sexy place I've been to in the last twenty years too.” She shot Veronica a disbelieving look. “And you've been running the entire Republic off of this thing?”
“It's been keeping my plans circumspect,” Veronica replied with a frown—forced to defend the honor of her special third date mass grave. “I make these sacrifices for the Republic.”
Shiv sniffled. “But that's your godsdamn excuse for everything,”
“It's not an excuse if it's true.”
The entire retinue had crossed over into the Unmass once more—but only after several more doses of liquid courage. Now, with everyone somewhere along the tipsy to hopeless drunk pipeline, they faced what might have been the former sanctum for Adam’s god. All eyes fell upon the mummified Demigod and the faint spark of divinity that still burned within his chest. Adam, in particular, reached out, trying to grasp that Divinity, even though it lurked far from his person. For a moment, it seemed like just a yearning gesture, yet as he pulled, the room shifted.
The mummies suddenly turned as one, spinning their torsos in a near-instant motion to face him, offering him their gestures of prayer and their hollow, waxen eyes.
“Holy fuck!” Rose gasped.
Shiv blinked hard—and then flinched a half second after Rose did, while Veronica covered her eyes and let out a high-pitched squeak. “Whoa!” he gasped.
The legion of supposed heretics glared at the gathered group. Then, the Inertium frequency of the room began to shift. A pitched note climbed higher as a squeal filled the air, drilling into everyone’s skulls like a tool of torture. Isabella clamped her ears shut, while Jessica stuck her head into Rusty to spare herself the pain.
Meanwhile, furling fingers of mist dragged themselves across the ground toward Adam, as the lacquered body of the enormous half-centipede Demigod grew dense with mist and—
“What pitiful, disgusting degeneracy is this?” The voice echoed not from the small glint of Divinity within the mummy, but from Adam himself. It seemed the heavy presence of the Tyrant was aroused once more—and from its tone alone, it was downright furious. “You bring me to my own house of sacrifice and choose to debase it with your intoxicated drool and stench? Is it your wish to inspire my judgment?”
“Yuh,” Shiv agreed, only kind of there.
Jessica had the audacity to nod along. Veronica, meanwhile, was clinging to both Shiv and Uva—while Kathereine peeked over her, both offended and terrified of the Tyrant of Peace as it threatened to descend in full as the falling palm that defined it.
“You…” the Tyrant growled—actually growled. “Preposterous. I refuse to speak to an audience of drunk children.”
“Is it because you don’t have—anything to tell us?” Shiv taunted, burping halfway through the sentence.
“I know what you are doing, you miserable cur!”
“So then prove me wrong. Tell us some stuff. About… the Great One. And other stuff.”
The mists around Adam flattened for a second. Then, the Tyrant gave its response: “I refuse.”
It promptly receded back into Adam with a thunderclap of divine pressure.
“Oh, wow, the prick crawled back up Adam’s ass,” Jessica said. “What a pussy.”
“Yeah,” Shiv agreed. “Coward shit.”
“Wasn’t the point luring it out to get actionable intelligence?” Adam asked through clenched teeth, the least drunk among them, except for Isabella, who had refused a sip.
“Oh, yeah. Oh, shit.” Shiv rubbed his face. “Adam… Can you… Can you push it out again?”
The Paragon looked like he wanted to strangle Shiv—and then himself. “Push it out?”
“Yeah, just… just squeeze it. Hard. Out.”
Veronica opened her mouth, but ended up making a squeezing gesture in front of Uva’s deeply unamused face.
Adam sighed. “I… I will… Maybe we should do this when we are all—”
Shiv jabbed a finger at—and then into—Adam’s open mouth, who gagged and stumbled back. “Shhh, Adam. Shhh. If we get sober, we get sad. This is the best… this is for the best. Drunk is best. So squeeze now. Squeeeezzzzeee.”
Slowly, Adam looked to Uva and Isabella for support, but the former repeated the squeezing gesture with a deadpan expression, while Isabella stood trembling at the sight of all the few thousand bodies.
The long-suffering Lord of Gate Piety sighed. “Okay. Okay. I’ll… try to squeeze.”