As a rule I don't do drugs. Potion making occasionally requires the use of substances that aren't strictly copasetic by the standards of the DEA but I'm extremely wary of anything that takes away agency from my own mind. A Wizard's level of skill paired with anything that impairs his judgement is pretty much the stuff of "bad idea 101." At best you start feeling like you can use your powers to accomplish things you shouldn't and at worst there are creatures who will take advantage of your open state of mind to do nasty things to it.

This isn't to say that I'm perfect. I drank beer occasionally - sometimes to excess. But the hard stuff that made you see things that weren't there? I got enough in the way of nasty looking things in my day job. The place Ammit had directed us to was an extremely pointed example of why I felt no impulse to induce hallucinations. I've been in strange pockets of the Nevernever… this… this was something else entirely. It was like H.R. Giger and H.P. Lovecraft had a baby let it be raised by Salvidor Dali Hieronymus Bosch.

The Sky Beetle skimmed along a blood red river, beneath an endless sky of golden sands. Enlil pitched and whirred the Goa'uld aircraft as crocodile like constructs of gemstones and starlight burst from the crimson waters to snap at the sky beetle. Mouths large enough to snap up a Megalodon yawed open around our plucky little craft, titanic muscles too slow the capture the vehicle.

And those, god help me, were the small ones.

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say that shooting isn't going to do much more than annoy those things." Kincaid intoned from his seat, a mixed air of disappointment and wariness in his voice. "I'm pretty sure you could fit the Twin Towers in that thing's mouth."

"Shoot anyway!" Enlil hissed in English, yanking the controls back and forth as he dodged a tongue the size of a chicago neighborhood.

"Will it do anything?" Kincaid shouted over the sudden whirr of discharging plasma.

"It will make me feel better." Enlil growled in the tongue of the Goa'uld, yanking on his braided beard.

Elil let loose a long string of Akkadian swear words, implying things about the crocodile's sexual proclivities that seemed wholly irrelevant to our plight as he pitched upward and spun the craft around. We re-oriented one hundred and eighty degrees so that the sands seemed like the ground as we dove away from the crocodile constructs. The white-gold sands sizzled and spat like molten lava, ensorcelled heat shimmering up from to distort our field of view into a mire of distorted light.

"Whore sons of Sobek - did that moron have no sense of scale?" Enlil groused as he pointed to the console in front of the Russian colonel. He directed the Colonel to manipulate a series of buttons and keys in broken English - interspersing his directions with more Akkadian curses.

"Sobek wasn't worth much in the real world, but he was the protector of the River of Life." Ammit cooed at the sight of the crystalline crocodiles as I might have at a newborn puppy. "Look at that - things of beauty."

"They're thoughtless monsters that do nothing but devour anything that enters the River uninvited." Enlil groused, leveling out the craft as close to the dunes as he dared to fly. As we approached the ground, gigantic shapes emerged on the horizon like the serrated teeth of some gigantic creature's jaw - arrayed along the dunes in a gruesome grin. Crystalline pyramids capped with golden crests, larger than the tallest mountain I'd ever seen.

As we got close enough skim along the base of one of the pyramids it became apparent that they were in fact arranged along the dislocated jaw of some long deceased crocodile that had leapt into the endless sand skies to die in the molten-hot dunes.

"Where the hell are we?" Thomas asked, narrowing his eyes against the glare coming up from the ground. "And what are they?"

"The souls of the dead." Muminah's eyes welled with tears as she looked out at the mass suffering. "They are the dead who have not found judgement. Those who weren't buried or guided properly into the afterlife. Those from the War of the First World."

"Unworthy." Ammit supplied in mangled English. "And lost. Ones without path to judgement or who feared it and fled."

Pitiful creatures that might once have been men and beasts writhed about the sands, mad with agony and desperation. They tore at each other's flesh, stealing limbs and organs to devour them in a futile attempt. They devoured them in a futile effort to make their mangled bodies whole. Massive creatures, twisted and burned in near-parody of human form, shambled the dunes. The flesh titans opened wide mouths and gaping maws to devour the smaller beings too entranced within their own petty squabbles of flesh to see their incoming doom.

The beings tried to climb over each other to reach our transport, ripping and clawing at each other to gain altitude. But it was futile - the creatures at the bottom dragged women, men, and what I desperately hoped weren't children, down to the ground as fast as they tried to reach up to grab us.

I caught glimpses of malevolent creatures of the Nevernever interspersed between the angry human charnel mass, beings that had been hungry or foolish enough to enter the hell of unending dunes. Ogres and what might have once been lesser dragons, battled the lost spirits in a futile effort to gain the upper hand against the tide of tortured flesh - now they were little more than gored husks of the creatures they had once been, feeding on the dead just to survive.

"This is hell." Spoke the Colonel in Russian, averting his eyes at the malformed chaos below us. "Hell is real and we are in it."

"I… I didn't think that there was a hell in the Egyptian religion." Thomas spoke in a voice of entirely justified panic.

"There isn't. Bad men are unmade" Ammit replied. "The guilty punish each other to avoid oblivion. They run. They hide. They feed to grow bigger. But all end. All end."

The sands seemed to be boiling as men and women churned up from it, crawling up through the searing granules. Screaming, they were always screaming. Some stayed whole people for long enough to realize the horror they'd emerged into before something older and crueler than they to fall upon them and rip them to charnel.

"Blood of Apep." Enlil snarled as he spun our craft upward to avoid the walls of the nearest pyramid as the crystalline walls opened up like a flowering shrub. The walls shattered in a wide crescent of razor sharp vines and flowering petals that rained down on the human hordes like a rain of spears. The twisted souls of the damned were pinned to the ground by long skewers, pinning them to the boiling sands. They continued to claw at each other and chew at the flesh of their fellows as the long skewers were grabbed in huge fistfuls.

Or, I suppose, pawfuls.

The pyramids, as it transpired, contained titanic creatures with the head of a hawk and the body of a lion. Their piercing screeches sounded like choirs of trumpets, brassy and bold. They culled the spirits by the hundreds, throwing them into huge linen sacks before tying off the mass of souls and disappearing back within the confines of their pyramids. The shattered lilly of crystal melted upwards, forcing itself back into the shape of a perfect pyramid and firing a beam of golden light into the River. The beam created a swirling tide pool of magical power that screamed with the horrified voices of the mangled souls as they went on to god alone knew where.

"Not that this shortcut through hell isn't fascinating, but aren't we going in the opposite direction from Buyan." The Mercenary intoned between firing pot-shots at anything that seemed able to even make a half-hearted attempt at flight. "Seems a bit counter intuitive."

"Buyan would destroy this craft. Would destroy a fleet." Ammit scoffed at the suggestion. "No - we need the chariot or we will die."

"Ammit." I rested my hand on the taller woman's scaled shoulder. "Do we have a destination in mind or are we just going to wander through Hell seeing the sights?"

"Look for the whitest group of people you can find." Ammit pointed at a mass of bodies intertwined into a huge ball of people, interconnected as they gnawed on each other's limbs and clawed at their privates. Their flesh was incongruously pink by comparison to the swarthy majority. They were too mangled for me to get a precise idea of their ethnic origins, but definitely European. "Those will do."

I groaned, realizing Ammit's plan. I addressed her in Goa'uld to avoid unnecessarily panicking Thomas. "We're going to have to actually go to the surface, aren't we?"

"Obviously. They crawled up through the Dunes, so we will have to travel in the opposite direction." Ammit replied as though it were the most simple thing one could possibly do. "The hull should be sufficiently armored to survive the impact."

"Should be?" Enlil yelped, tugging on his beard in frustration even as he accelerated downwards. "I'm not loving 'should be' as an assessment for our survival."

"Just let me open a Way." I raised my staff, only for Ammit to grab my arm.

"We need to hit the ground. If the Warden opens a way in the air we'll just end up out in the galaxy somewhere - probably somewhere unpleasant." Given that she was currently suggesting a jaunt down through the twisted masses of the damned, I was disinclined to discover a place she deemed "unpleasant."

"That is the ground. That is the ground! That is the ground!" The Colonel screamed in horror as Enlil pitched the craft towards the ground. The Russian officer pulled his sidearm out, pointing it at Enlil and demanding that the Goa'uld restore the proper altitude. Enlil didn't even look up from piloting the craft as he hip-fired a zat-gun at the Russian soldier. I would swear that he giggled at the man's convulsions as he dove the craft towards the ground.

"No, no, no, no, no!" My brother screeched in increasing pitch and volume as we plummeted through the twisted pink bodies. The buzz-whirr of the ships guns failed to keep up with the sudden preponderance of targets. The sheer kinetic force of the ship liquified the bodies as we moved through their screaming mass, piercing the molten sands and continuing down through the earth. Every once in a while we came face-to-face with an terrified soul trying to claw its way into the afterlife before it became a red smear on the craft's viewscreen.

My armor displayed a frenetic series of confused warnings as the system failed to connect the inputs it was receiving with any laws of physics or logic. The hull damage warning bothered me, but we never reached marker which would delineate a loss of spaceworthyness. Ptah really had loved armor.

The ship rumbled as we drove it through the swirling sands, before piercing the bright-hot earth and emerging into total darkness, the molten sands dissolving into ectoplasm as we broke the barrier between the real world and the Nevernever.

And then the world was on fire.

I would later come to find out that the Russian permafrost covers massive deposits of gas, both in a traditional petrochemical like oil and other gasses like methane. Hypothetically, if a well intentioned Wizard was to have emerged within one of those pockets in a superheated spacecraft, he would hardly be to blame for those pockets of gas igniting. Practically speaking, what I'm saying is that for the second time in a week I managed to blow up a quite substantial portion of Russia - forcibly expelling the Sky Beetle into the air out of a two hundred and sixty foot wide hole plunging down into a fire that had enough propellant to keep it going effectively forever.

But really, who was using that part of Siberia anyway?

"Where are we?" Muminah asked nervously.

"Russia." I replied looking at the map on my HUD, repeating the word to the terrified Russian soldiers. "We're in Russia."

The three of them were white-knuckle clutching the seatbelts on their chairs, eyes wide and seemingly too terrified to move. It wasn't exactly military bearing but in their defense, I had literally taken them to hell and back. I tapped the crystalline display of the viewscreen, manipulating it so that it showed a map. "We're in Russia. It looks like Siberia. I need one of you to tell me where we are in relation to Verkhoyansk."

The young major who'd asked me about my Empire - Vallarin I think he was called - was the first to regain his wits, unfasten himself and walk over to me cautiously. He was approaching me with a degree of reverence and fear that he'd not exercised previously. In fairness, he'd seen quite a few things to give him a healthy dose of reality with regards to his relative ability to harm me. "I - I think we're in the Yamal Peninsula…"

"Of course, the End of the Earth is where one goes to reach Hell. Why wouldn't it be?" Jibed the sarcastic voice of the mustachioed Lieutenant Marchenko as he helped Major Kirensky let go of his seat belts. The glum faced Major was stony faced, staring out into the middle distance as he tried to say a prayer that he clearly only remembered half the words to.

"You're taking them shooting the Colonel disturbingly well." Kincaid remarked, standing up from the gunner's chair, pointing to the man slumped in the copilot's chair.

"It's not lethal." Vallarin shrugged. "And we're not in hell any more. I'm finding it difficult to argue with a man who stopped someone from shooting the pilot of a craft I'm inside.

"That … looked pretty darn lethal." Replied my brother, poking the man with his finger and causing an agonized groan. "Hell, it looked like you'd want it to be."

"One shot stuns. Two shots kill. Three shots disintegrates." Marchenko spoke as he helped Kirensky to his feet. "It's a stupid weapon but I'm hardly in a position to argue its utility."

"We're… eh… twenty five hundred kilometers from our destination." Vallarin traced his finger along the map, drawing a picture of where we needed to go. "Da, with this thing? We can be there in minutes."

"Ammit, would you mind?" Enlil gestured to the controls. "I want a word with the Warden before we get there."

"No, Enlil. That's fine." Ammit swapped places with the Babylonian god, shaking the Colonel till he woke with a start. She leaned in close to the Russian and said in English. "You try to shoot. I eat hand. Understand?"

"I understand." Replied the Colonel, wincing at the agony from the Zat weapon's after effects as his muscles spasmed out of control.

The Akkadian god handed me his Zat weapon, giving it to me hilt first. I took it, arching a brow in confusion behind my mask as I asked. "Any particular reason you're disarming yourself?"

"Warden, that is my weapon. It is capable of inflicting horrific damage upon mortal beings." He looked at me with eyes marked with thick lines of painted makeup. "We are not heading to fight a mortal being. In this fight I am useless to you."

"Enlil, you're not useless…" I began to disagree with him only for him to cut me off with a raised finger.

"Yes, Warden. I am. I am not tattooed with wards or a queen of war. I am not a mortal warrior who has bound themselves to an impossible quest. If you bring me to Buyan I am as good as dead."

I shook my head. "Enlil, this isn't a suicide mission. I have every intention of bringing everyone home."

Ammit scoffed. "Yeah - good luck with that Warden."

"This was your idea." I hissed in reply.

"And I know that it's pretty much a suicide run." Ammit scoffed. "Koschei was alive before the Folly and nobody managed to take him out. Best case, we free the Archive and only most of us die."

Enlil jumped in, building off Ammit's pessimism. "Warden, as it stands right now your entire Empire relies upon the three of us to run. If all of us die or are captured, we've doomed your subjects to slavery and death. Best case scenario Apophis conquers us. Then only your children are guaranteed to die. The rest just probably languish in torture and reeducation. I am useless to your fight against Koschei, let me take this craft and administrate. Let me do you actual good."

"You don't think we're coming back." I stated, terrified that I hadn't phrased it as a question.

"You? Ammit? Perhaps - you're both talented at defeating enemies stronger than you are." Enlil smiled sadly. "Me? I've lived this long because I've understood my limits. Anyone less than a god won't walk away from buyan… and I am not as much of a god as I would prefer to be."

I wanted to be angry at Enlil for abandoning me. I wanted to punch him in his smug face for turning away from the fight against Koschei. But he was right - this was a guy who used mordite as his weapon of choice. Survival was far from guaranteed and - even though he was a prick who wanted slaves - he was more useful to me on Nekheb helping Bob run the day to day admin than he would be to me as a corpse.

"Fine." I agreed, looking at the zat weapon in my hand. "Once you've dropped us off you can go back to Nekheb on one condition."

"Name it." Enlil raised a heavily manicured brow.

I raised the weapon, pointed it at my unwitting target, and fired. His back had been to me, so it wasn't difficult to hit him even with his enhanced reflexes. He slumped over, falling bonelessly to the ground. I didn't love hurting him - but I didn't have time to argue the semantics of what "was" and "wasn't" his fight.

"Take the Vampire back to Chicago." I leaned down, holding my hand device over my brother to check his pulse. I wasn't worried that I'd killed him. White Court Vampires were made of siffer stuff than people were - which was why there was a chance that it wouldn't take.

I lifted my brother up, carrying him to the cargo hold and closing the door on him. Enlil's eyes bulged briefly, his mouth forming the word "Chicago" in bafflement before he said. "I… I don't know the path, Lord Warden. How does one reach Chicago?"

"I'll mark the map." I replied. "But under no circumstances - none, you understand me - no matter what happens you are not to step foot in Chicago."

"We just traveled the paths of the damned and it is Chicago that troubles you?" Enlil replied, in a voice that sounded as though he was reconsidering staying. He paused briefly, tugging at his beard. "Oh Apep - that will re-awaken his hunger, I'm sure of it."

"Don't be a baby." Ammit scoffed. "It can't break through the bulkhead. You'll be fine."

"Your choice Enlil. Take the vampire to Chicago or come to Buyan." I shrugged. "But if I get back to Nekheb and the vampire is anything but safely in Chicago, you'll wish I left you with the damned."

Enlil groaned, "Are you sure my wife didn't send you?"

"Who?"

"Nevermind."