Page 50 of Dark Fae's Destiny

“Perhaps a Nexus Realm Staphylogenes or his peers never quite finished.” Quinn muses as we watch an entire tower drift through the mist, spinning slowly through space as if it isn’t tethered to what keeps us on the misty ground. “Perhaps it’s a Vir all its own—like our Seventh Vir, which is the Twilight Realm—a vibrational Realm the Ascendants began to create, then abandoned for some reason, after making part of it with the Music.”

“Who knows what gods do with their endeavors,” Ariana adds with quiet awe now as she looks around, “or why they abandon them.”

“I guess this is the start of Staphylogenes’ labyrinth.” I glance at Quinn. “It seems appropriate, with all this mist and unfinished spaciousness. So, where do we go from here?”

“Ariana?” Quinn looks at her again, because so far, her truth-reading power has been the most helpful to us.

Though she shakes her head now with a delicate frown, as if confused.

“I’m not getting any intuitions about this place.” She looks around. We suddenly see an entire waterfall, with water pouring from nowhere and going nowhere, drift by us, large as life and cacophonous with sound before it drifts back into the mist.

All the sudden noise of falling water gone.

“It’s as if the Music here is… fractured. Broken.” Ariana scowls more. “Things here are… untethered to reality. I feel not that this world was unfinished, but that something or someone broke it long ago. And now, it is what it is. A nothing space.”

“Broken.” Quinn scowls deeply now as I feel a deep flare of his power roil through us—and not in a nice way. “Master Ilyov warned us that the Music can break reality if wielded the wrong way. Are you saying you feel something like that happened here?”

“Yes.” Ariana answers without hesitation, as every one of my hackles goes up now to understand this was a world which had once been complete.

But which was broken by the Music.

Irreparably.

“Fuck.” I growl now as we look around. Some kind of whirling energy goes screaming through the mist now—making us all duck fast, to not be hammered by it. It disappears.

And with it goes all my comfort in this place.

“We need to leave here. Now.” My own deepest instinct is flaring inside me now, that this place is vastly dangerous. Things still exist here, I understand. It’s not just broken palaces and earth that drift through the nothingness; it’s things the ancients created.

One of which comes barreling through the mist now—straight at us.

Like a manticore as big as a mansion, a massive bull-like creature with flaming, poisoned horns and twenty tails made of scorpions comes at us. As it roars, diseased green spittle flies from its mouth. That mouth is nothing but fangs; Quinn and I are fast on the defensive to stop it.

We come together, slamming up a hard wall of magic before ourselves and Ariana, protecting her with our seething auras and wings as this creature barrels in. It doesn’t stop as it sees our vast flare of magic, but slams right into us.

As if confused, or beyond enraged, the thing hammers into our seething wall of magic, staggering both Quinn and I like a bomb went off before us. But our wall holds, as the rageful creature is suddenly bounced back.

Right into the mist—disappearing.

“Gods!” Quinn’s dark breath says it all. “There is more to this place than it seems!”

“Where did it go?” I whip my head, scanning the mist, even as Quinn and I hold our wall of magic before us.

“Things get lost in the mist,” Ariana says from behind us. As I risk a glance back at her, a terrible feeling sweeps through me, matching the horror on her face. “They get lost in it, Lucca. They get lost… and then they go mad. Forever.”

“Trapped.” Quinn growls, a vicious sound as he watches the mist. “If we step one foot wrong in this place, we’ll be lost in that mist, too. Going mad forever… as the Gold Eyes celebrates.”

“I don’t know if he can even sense we’re in here,” Ariana says with even more horror now as she regards the nowhere-space. “He used this place as the start of his labyrinth, but remember, even he can’t solve this puzzle anymore without his Light. We have our Light, still. I say we use it… and see what comes.”

“Light this motherfucker up, then.” I say, as I see something that makes me think Ariana’s right. At the edges of Quinn’s and my wall, where my brightest rainbows and his most seething fire touch that impenetrable blue-grey mist, I see it curl away. I see there’s something beneath our feet, as well.

A golden road, perhaps.

Long decimated, pitted, and decayed.

“Look.” I nod at our feet as Quinn and Ariana glance down. I feel them see what I’m seeing; that the area we’re standing on might have once been something, before this mist took this entire broken world over.

It’s something we can use now, an anchoring-point of sorts, that might help us survive in this place.

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