Chapter 12
The violent barrage of metallic frost abruptly stopped.
There was no gradual fading of the Chromatic Storm.
One second, the hail was chewing away at the basalt entrance of the smuggler’s hollow with the sound of grinding gears; the next, an eerie, suffocating silence dropped over the Ashen Wastes.
The sudden lack of noise was heavy enough to make Drystan Harrow’s eardrums pop.
He pushed himself away from the damp cavern wall. His joints popped in the cold, a symphony of abused cartilage and exhausted muscle.
He didn't need to speak. Nymeria Shade was already moving. She brushed a thick layer of alkaline dust from her deeply plunging, cropped black velvet corset. The garment was torn and filthy, offering absolutely no defense against the brutal climate, yet it aggressively emphasized her extraordinarily large bust. It was a stark, almost absurd contrast of appealing gothic fashion against the grim, dirt-stained reality of their survival. She adjusted her short, pleated tartan skirt and met Drystan’s gaze.
Her amber eyes were dull from mana starvation, but the cynical fire of her willpower remained entirely intact.
The execution countdown on Drystan’s left wrist pulsed.
The strobing crimson and gold runes cast a localized, bloody glow against the dark linen of his sleeve. Seventy-one hours. The biological clock was a merciless passenger.
"The sky broke," Drystan rasped, his voice raw. "We move."
He stepped out of the hollow. The Ashen Wastes were transformed. The calcified white dust was now covered in a thick layer of jagged, corrupted ice. The petrified Ironwood trees had been stripped bare, their rusted-steel trunks gleaming wetly in the pale, slate-gray morning light.
Every step was an agonizing negotiation with his own anatomy.
The broken rib in his chest demanded absolute stillness, punishing him with a sharp, grinding heat every time his heavy leather boots crunched against the frost. The crude, horrific patch job on his Weave-Gauntlet felt like a block of lead strapped to his forearm.
He didn't complain. He couldn't afford the breath.
They marched eastward, leaving the relative safety of the hidden ravine behind.
The journey was a masterclass in paranoia.
The howling wind had died, leaving the Wastes completely silent.
Every snap of a frozen twig, every shifting pile of ash, sounded like a gunshot.
They navigated the skeletal maze of the dead forest, their eyes scanning the horizon for the massive, genetically engineered silhouettes of the Luminous Vanguard.
After two brutal hours of trekking through the frozen ash, the horizon grew dark.
The Obsidian Spires of Kaelath rose from the earth like a row of jagged, black teeth piercing the sky.
The sheer, cyclopean scale of Fate Academy was terrifying to behold from the outside.
The outer perimeter wall was a seamless, monolithic slab of dark iron and opaque glass, stretching hundreds of feet into the air.
Drystan stopped, dropping to one knee behind a massive mound of petrified roots. Nymeria immediately crouched beside him, her twilight skin pale and shivering.
"Look," she whispered, pointing a trembling finger toward the top of the massive wall.
High above, walking along the sprawling battlements, was a patrol of golden zealots.
Even from this distance, Drystan could see the blinding glare of their polished armor and the humming, concentrated light of their halberds.
There were dozens of them. Evander Cross had not been bluffing.
The academy was a fortress locked in a state of total war against a single, glitching anomaly.
"They have the high ground," Nymeria stated, her raspy voice tight. "They can see the entire perimeter. If we step out of the treeline, we'll be spotted in seconds."
Drystan closed his eyes. The pain in his chest flared, but he pushed past it, diving deep into his encyclopedic meta-knowledge. The game's map unfolded in his mind. He visualized the digital grid, looking for the microscopic flaws in the developer's design.
The main gates are sealed. The aerial wards will vaporize anything that flies. But the academy was built on top of a living ecosystem. The mana has to vent.
"There is a drainage culvert," Drystan said, opening his icy gray eyes.
"A subterranean runoff pipe used to flush stagnant aether from the lower testing grounds into the Wastes.
It's an old asset. The developers—the architects—never bothered to update the wards there because the toxicity of the runoff is supposed to be lethal. "
"Where?" Nymeria demanded.
"Directly ahead. Buried under the ash at the base of the wall."
They waited until the Luminous patrol marched past their section of the battlements, their golden armor disappearing behind a massive obsidian watchtower.
"Now," Drystan hissed.
They broke from the treeline. The sprint across the open expanse of ash was the longest thirty seconds of Drystan’s life.
His leather duster snapped wildly around his ankles.
He felt completely exposed, a moving target against a stark white canvas.
He waited for the deafening hum of a hard-light halberd or the mechanical shriek of an Inquisitor-Gargoyle.
They slammed against the base of the monolithic iron wall. Drystan’s breath hitched in a ragged, bloody gasp.
He immediately dropped to his knees and began digging frantically with his functional right hand.
The calcified ash was packed tight, frozen solid by the recent hail.
The sharp shards of ice tore open the healing scabs on his palm, sending fresh crimson dripping into the dirt.
Nymeria dropped beside him, using her bare, delicate hands to claw at the freezing earth.
Three feet down, Drystan’s bloody fingers struck cold, rusted metal.
He cleared the dirt away, revealing a heavy iron grate set into the foundation of the wall. The metal was heavily corroded, covered in a thick layer of disgusting, luminescent green slime.
Drystan wedged his fingers beneath the heavy iron bars. He couldn't use his left arm. He had to rely entirely on the muscular strength of his right side and the leverage of his legs.
He pulled. The grate didn't budge. The rust had fused it to the stone.
"Help me," he grunted, the veins in his neck bulging.
Nymeria grabbed the bars beside his hand. She possessed no physical strength, her body starved of mana and shivering from the cold, but she threw her entire weight backward.
With a sickening screech of tearing metal, the rusted hinges snapped. The heavy iron grate came loose, tumbling backward into the ash.
A foul, suffocating stench immediately rolled out of the dark, circular tunnel. It smelled strongly of wet rust and stagnant, decaying magic. It was the smell of a forgotten grave.
"Ladies first," Drystan wheezed, collapsing onto his back in the dirt.
Nymeria didn't hesitate. She squeezed her voluptuous frame into the narrow, slime-coated pipe, crawling into the pitch-black darkness without a single complaint.
Drystan rolled over and followed her.
The transition from the Ashen Wastes back into the academy grounds was not a grand, cinematic entrance.
It was a humiliating, claustrophobic nightmare.
The diameter of the pipe was barely wide enough to accommodate Drystan’s broad shoulders.
He had to drag himself forward on his stomach.
His ruined left arm was pinned awkwardly against his side, the brass plating of the Weave-Gauntlet scraping loudly against the stone.
Every inch forward was a battle against panic. The ceiling of the pipe pressed down on him. The stagnant slime soaked through his heavy leather duster, chilling him to the bone. The air was so toxic with aether-runoff it made his eyes water and his throat burn.
Tick.
The execution countdown flared on his wrist, the strobing red light briefly illuminating the disgusting, slick walls of the tunnel. Sixty-eight hours.
"I see light," Nymeria’s voice echoed back to him, distorted and muffled by the enclosed space.
A faint, violent red glow appeared at the end of the tunnel. It wasn't the bruised purple twilight of the academy. It was an angry, localized luminescence.
Drystan dragged himself out of the culvert, tumbling onto a jagged surface. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, gasping for untainted oxygen.
He froze.
The freezing chill of the Ashen Wastes was gone. In its place was a wall of absolute, blistering heat. The air was so hot it instantly evaporated the freezing sweat on Drystan’s forehead. The moisture in his eyes began to sting.
He slowly stood up.
They were standing on the precipice of the Weeping Caldera.
The environment was horrifying. It was a massive, craterous depression in the earth, easily two miles wide. The ground beneath their boots was not stone; it was dark, crystallized glass, formed by the sheer, constant geological pressure of the localized magic.
At the bottom of the massive crater, sluggish rivers of boiling, liquid red mana flowed like molten lava.
The violent crimson light illuminated the entire depression, casting horrific, twisted shadows across the jagged, glass-like banks.
Huge vents in the earth violently expelled plumes of superheated steam.
The smell was overpowering. It tasted of scalding brass and scorched salt, thick enough to coat the tongue.
"By the Loom," Nymeria whispered.
She stood beside him, her twilight skin flushed with sudden, feverish heat. Her torn velvet corset offered absolutely no protection from the ambient radiation. The oppressive heat pressed against them, a physical, heavy weight that demanded submission.
Drystan took a step forward. His boot crunched loudly against the glass-like shore.
The sheer, overwhelming scale of the Caldera broke him.