Page 89

Elias
We spent a week getting here. A week of fighting Severin’s lovely little welcoming committee, nightmarish creatures that never should’ve existed, crawling through the Rift like sentient rot, tearing through the fabric of this place like it was meant to be devoured.
A week of barely sleeping, barely eating, pushing forward through unnatural lands where time folded in on itself, where the ground wasn’t always ground, where the sky sometimes forgot what color it was supposed to be.
And now, after all that suffering, all that carnage, all those incredible near-death experiences I did not sign up for.
We’re finally here.
The fortress.
Or whatever awful thing you want to call it.
Because this isn’t a place.
It’s a statement.
And that statement is suffering.
The first thing I notice is the wrongness of it.
Not in the way the Rift is wrong, not shifting, not alive, but something worse, something deliberate. Something built to beoppressive, designed for the sole purpose of reminding you that you don’t belong here.
The walls are tall, made of something darker than stone, denser than iron, not quite black, not quite void, something that eats the light without swallowing it entirely. The surface is smooth in some places, jagged in others, spines of warped metal protruding at odd, violent angles.
The structure itself is impossibly vast, stretching out in ways that make my eyes hurt if I try to track the edges. The towers are wrongly built, slanting inward, curving like they were melted and reshaped, but never quite finished.
It doesn’t look abandoned.
It looks forgotten by time itself.
"So," I say, tipping my head back to take in the sheer, overwhelming horror of it all, "this is cozy."
Luna, beside me, exhales through her nose. "Do you ever shut up?"
"No," I say, far too cheerfully. "It’s part of my charm."
Lucien doesn’t react. He stands at the front, gaze locked on the fortress, his expression unreadable, but I can feel the weight of his thoughts, the sharp calculation behind his silence.
Because he knows.
He knows what this place is.
I shift slightly, adjusting my grip on the reins, the horse beneath me restless. "So, anyone want to guess where they’re keeping our lovely, dramatic disasters?"
"Inside," Lucien says flatly.
I blink. "Great detective work, boss."
Luna sighs, already looking at the massive, heavily warded entrance ahead of us.
Because, of course.
Of course it wouldn’t just be a door.
The entrance isn’t a gate or a set of double doors like a normal, sane fortress might have. No, this thing is a gaping maw of interlocking mechanisms, golden sigils carved into the blackened metal, pulsing with an energy I don’t like, something ancient, something that recognizes what we are and does not intend to let us pass.
"I can break that," Luna murmurs, more to herself than to us.