Chapter 61: To the End
Overworld Calendar: Month Six, Day Twenty-Two
Salsh stood before his portal frame with a hollowness in his gut. Building such a thing should have been a substantial achievement- it was a rare honor within his tribe- yet any pride he might have felt was smothered by regret as to why he'd built it. He wouldn't shoulder the guilt of his ancestors, but he was still at war, that fact hadn't changed. The portal was a necessity, not an advancement of his skills.
Matthew and Alice were the first to join him that morning, indulging in a small breakfast as usual, but there were no jokes told or stories shared. Their focus was solely on the mission at hand. As the Dwellers of the Ashen Fields began to gather by the dungeon, geared up with whatever armor and tools could be fashioned for them, Salsh's anxiety spiked.
"I should warn you, once we enter… you may not be able to return for some time. Our means of reaching the Overworld have been limited ever since the invasion's end." Salsh looked at his friends. "If you two do not wish to follow me… I understand completely."
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Alice and Matthew shared a look, and he could see the uncertainty on their faces. They'd been willing to help him, and Salsh would be forever grateful, but asking them to join him on a potentially one-way trip was leagues beyond anything they'd done for him.
"I'll do it," Matthew said at last, with a nervous laugh. "What's the worst that could- oh… right…"
Alice took his hand. "And I'll be right there with you, Matt. Whatever happens, we'll take it on together. Us, the Dwellers… and you, Salsh."
He bowed to them. "Your bravery will be forever known by the Keepers of the Hallowed Grounds, mark my words."
The Cindered One entered the room, accompanied by Dunera and a few guards clad in iron armor. The suits didn't fit their tall, lanky frame ideally, but they would be better than nothing.
"Are we ready?" asked the chieftess, staring at the portal frame. "My tribesmen are prepared, Salsh'namisherad."
"As are we," he replied. He took a breath, opened his bag, and withdrew the first Halzost'gan. The pearls were personal belongings of all Void Walkers, created as rites of passage from childhood to adolescence. Seeing one activated by the heat, with its dark pit making it resemble an eye, led him to wonder who had originally owned the pearl. He felt as if the departed spirit of that Enderman was watching him, and he hoped they would not hold his use of their treasure against him.
"Wherever your spirit has gone to now… I hope you will find peace."
Salsh inserted it into the first slot on the portal frame. The pearl slid into place with a short, high note like the toll of a bell. He repeated the process, one by one, note by note, until there was a single empty slot remaining. Salsh held his breath and filled it.
A deep, resounding bang emitted from the portal as he inserted the final Halzost'gan . All twelve eyes lit up even brighter green, their combined energies flowing together and bringing forth the gateway to the End. Pitch black and speckled with distant pale dots, the portal almost resembled the Overworld's night sky. The frame had been built directly on the floor, leaving no room between it and the stone beneath, but that would not stop them.
"This is it… we're really doing it," Alice whispered.
Everyone was watching Salsh expectantly. He would be the first to enter, then. Taking another deep breath, he stepped forward and plunged feet-first through his gateway. As all went dark, his final thought in the Overworld was a hope that he had not seen it for the last time.
Lurex'skonaslar entered the throne room and bowed upon reaching the center. Phoros'malmislar, slumped and bored-looking where he sat, narrowed his eyes at her. "I did not expect to see you here now."
Lurex chose her words carefully. "The residents of the Land of Endless Blaze struck in greater numbers than expected, but Geres'anmislar will handle them."
Phoros was behind her an instant later, having teleported from his throne. He spoke in a deep growl, and she could practically feel his eyes boring through her. "It may interest you to know that Geres'anmislar is dead. He was apparently killed in an encounter with a Keeper of the Hallowed Grounds, and a pair of Walkers of the Blue Pain. His remaining forces fled back here as quickly as they could, and they reported your disastrous handling of the situation in Dalloreis."
She had to resist a scowl. So Geres had perished, yet even in death he found a way to get on her nerves. The brute must have let his need for revenge cloud his better judgment, to say nothing of his tactical prowess. And now she was being reprimanded for his failure to kill three of the most minor of foes.
"His loss is regrettable," Lurex finally said. "Many capable fighters were slain in the battle. But with all due respect, Mighty One, I believe our operations in the Land of Endless Blaze were not in vain."
"Yes, this… 'blacksteel,' as your reports put it." Phoros stepped around her and held out a claw expectantly. "You seemed very enthusiastic about this finding… show me."
Lurex pulled a heavy black ingot from a pocket of her robe and gave it to him. "This is a combination of gold and a mineral found in the Land of Endless Blaze. You'll find it to be stronger than any other material in our possession… just imagine the armor we can make with it. The Dwellers of the Ashen Fields were made to procure more of the raw mineral for us, and we have a respectable supply already."
He tested the ingot's weight and dragged a claw across it without leaving a scratch. Lurex saw the faintest of smiles on his face before he gave it back to her. "Impressive, I will admit. With even a few of our elite fighters wearing this, we will be exponentially more powerful."
A moment later, his expression was stern again. "There is another problem. Regarding our command over the Mindless Walkers… your essence of control is running low."
Phoros' concern was understandable. The Acolytes, Lurex couldn't deny, were hardly numerous enough to form a truly powerful empire. The Void Walkers as a whole had only partially recovered from their losses to the Wicked Two from centuries prior, and their population was still relatively low. Therefore, if their tribe was to establish a foothold in the other dimensions, they would need to rely on soldiers of a different nature.
Trade with the Walkers of the Voluntary Exile- the Illagers, as she believed they called themselves- had yielded the secrets of necromancy to the Violet Gaze. Frustratingly, Lurex had not been able to fully learn their dark sorcery, and her initial hordes of undead creatures had proven difficult to control. A breakthrough in her research came following her first few expeditions into the Land of Endless Blaze, where her scouts had discovered the crystallized tears of the flying white beasts.
"Our occupation of Dalloreis yielded more than just blacksteel," she replied, holding out one of them for him to see. "Geres'anmislar and his forces collected many of these tears for us. I will use them to obtain more essence shortly."
Phoros nodded, but his face still showed a trace of concern. "Your study, it remains secure?"
"Entirely. I have it under constant surveillance, with heavy security measures in place, and each essence harvest is only as long as it needs to be."
She would have elaborated further, but the chamber door opened behind them. In stepped an Acolyte messenger, who bowed before delivering his report. "An envoy from the Fliers of the Open Skies has arrived, Mighty One. They seek an audience."
"Well overdue," Phoros said. He turned to Lurex and gave one final order. "I must attend to this. Continue to procure soldiers for us; our next targets are the Watchers of the Whispering Groves, and they are simple enough targets for the undead."
Lurex bowed as he made his way out with the messenger. She couldn't wait to put their new forces to the test again, but she had a procedure to attend to first. She left the throne room and made her way through the halls of Nuroslar's central fortress, passing by soldiers and laborers, until she reached a doorway flanked by two Acolyte guards. Recognizing her authority, they stepped aside and opened the doors for her, and she entered a wide, circular chamber. Lining the walls were structures called void gateways, unique portals in that they did not lead between dimensions, but rather to other distant points in the Land of Infinite Void. They were comprised of a top and bottom stone shell shaped like a small pyramid, with a small black miasma in the gap between them. Lurex approached one gateway and reached into it, disappearing once her hand made contact with the portal.
She wound up at an outpost of her tribe far from the city, located on a remote island with no other landmasses around it- there were only the endless sky above and the bottomless depths below. The sole feature of the island was a heavily secured compound built with obsidian and the strongest voidstone bricks they could make. There was no door, so Lurex teleported inside- she knew the interior perfectly well by then.
A small gathering of her fellow Acolyte researchers and a few security forces stood around a flowing wall of water. A large iron cage had been erected within the vile substance, arranged in a square at the room's center, and a gruesome sight lay within. A gigantic skeleton, larger than any creature's in any known world, was sprawled across the floor. Its torso and long neck were half-covered in putrid, rotting flesh and dull black scales, while its limbs, head, and the pair of wings on its back were fully skeletal. There was a long glass tube down the throat and into the chest, reaching all the way through the water walls and bars so its open end could be accessed outside.
"Does it remain stable?" Lurex asked the nearest researcher.
He gestured to the skull, pointing at the hollow interior behind its eye sockets. "Yes, there have been no signs of activity beyond what we adjusted for initially. However, I believe it would be wise to space our extractions further apart, lest we regenerate too much of it at once."
Lurex frowned. That would pose a problem, especially if more and more undead soldiers would be necessary as their plans progressed. Still, Phoros demanded an army, and she was going to give him one.
"One more procedure will suffice for now," she declared, pulling out a crystal tear. "Bring me a Halzost'gan ."
A heat-charged pearl was brought to her, along with a handful of small glass blocks. Lurex crushed the tear and rolled the pearl in its dust, causing a second reaction for the pearl. Its color changed entirely, from pale green to a light purple, and the glass began to attract toward it in a rush. The blocks shattered against one another, then their shards merged into larger formations than before and encased the activated pearl. When the transformation was complete, Lurex held a purple gemstone shielded by sharp layers of glass.
This modified Halzost'gan had once been instrumental to the Keepers of the Hallowed Grounds, a vital key of their experiments on reaching other dimensions, but she had found a very different use for it. Lurex handed the gemstone back to the researcher.
"You know what to do."
He looked nervous- she didn't blame him- but didn't protest. She watched him teleport into the cage, beyond the flowing waterfalls, and approach the skeletal husk. Lurex opened a chest beside the cage filled with empty glass bottles and gathered a few, holding an open one at the end of the tube.
"Commence the extraction!"
The researcher crouched until he could reach an opening in the rib cage, then stuffed the gemstone into it as if implanting a new heart into the husk. He warped out of the cage immediately, and the chamber fell silent to observe the procedure.
Bright purple wisps seeped out of the gemstone and into the skeleton, and the scales on the torso shuddered. A pulse of deep black vapor flowed down the glass pipe and into Lurex's bottle. When it was full, she quickly capped it then held another to be filled, and then another. She repeated this until she had fifteen bottles, at which point the gemstone's power appeared to run dry, siphoned away by the skeleton. A few more rotten patches of scales and flesh had formed around the torso, but otherwise there were no signs of further repair.
"This is our largest supply yet," Lurex remarked, very pleased with the results. "It will go a long way for our army."
She of the Abyssal Tyranny had been resurrected for but a few weak breaths, before death reclaimed her once again.
"I began to notice odd behaviors. They would only attack those who looked directly at them, and otherwise seemed content to leave us be. Surely they knew of our actions, yet the Endermen never fled when we approached, as if hoping we would simply ignore them. That hesitation vanished in an instant when our gazes met, and the frenzied attacks which had destroyed my village began anew. My suspicions were confirmed when I caught a glimpse of one Enderman struggling to escape the violet particles of light which always hovered around them, only to be overtaken and go very still: some unknown force was controlling them."
Alice stumbled as her feet landed on a hard surface faster than she'd been ready for. She and Matthew had jumped into the portal together, hand in hand, but they hadn't expected to only fall for about a second before finding solid ground again. Her eyes had been squeezed shut, and she felt nothing unusual as she took the leap, so she wondered if she hadn't actually gone anywhere but rather simply landed on the dungeon's floor beneath the frame.
How wrong she was.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw nothing above her. Not the roof of the dungeon, not the mansion's ceiling, not the bright morning sky. Just… nothing. She stared, unblinking and unmoving, into an endless fuzzy void, vaguely black in color. But then, she wasn't sure if it even had a color. If she squinted, she thought she could make out an occasional dark shape in the hazy emptiness, without much of a form to it, but when she tried to focus on anything she found her attention slipping away until there was nothing overhead but the void again. And the longer she looked, the less perceptive she began to feel, until her sense of self slowly dwindled…
"Alice! Matthew!"
She blinked, snapping out of her trance at Salsh's voice and finally looking down. He was right in front of them, a look of grave concern on his face.
"Focus on me," he instructed. "Nowhere else."
She didn't realize just how terrified she felt until she saw him. Alice breathed heavily, still holding Matthew's hand in a tight grip, and the pair of them stared at Salsh without daring to look away. When his tense posture finally relaxed, Alice felt as if she'd awakened from a long, long nightmare.
"I should have known you would need to adjust," he sighed. "This place… it is so different to your world, your minds likely could not handle so much of it at once. Do you feel well?"
"I-I'm okay, I think," Matthew said with a shudder. Alice could only nod.
Salsh took a step back, then gestured to the ground. "Look down if you need to reorient yourselves again. And don't hesitate to ask me for help if you need it."
Alice finally looked at what she was standing on. They'd landed on a mass of rocks, bumpily textured not unlike cobblestone but garish yellow in color. The stone platform extended a short ways ahead of them, after which it ended and left only a view of the infinite void. She didn't look beyond the edge for more than a second before turning to see the Dwellers of the Ashen Fields appearing behind them, one by one, from thin air. Salsh had been right; there wasn't any way back to the mansion- back to the Overworld.
As the Endermen dispersed around the platform to get their bearings, the Cindered One and Dunera approached them. The latter seemed to have trouble focusing, and Alice wondered if she'd never actually been to her race's homeworld before.
Dunera finally came to attention and translated the Cindered One when she said something to Salsh. "Well done, Groundskeeper, your portal has worked perfectly."
"I'm not so sure," Salsh replied, looking around with a sigh. "I don't think I recognize this area."
"Maybe we can find some locals?" suggested Alice. "There must be another tribe somewhere around here, right?"
Salsh absentmindedly fiddled with the wrapping around his stump. "We tend to live far apart from one another… still, we don't have much else to go on right now, so I suppose we'll just have to search for ourselves." He pointed behind them, where the other Dwellers were staring. "We can begin in that direction; perhaps I can find a landmark I recognize."
They made their way to the front of the crowd and looked out at the world beyond their little platform. It was connected to others like it: small islands of end stone dotted with tall, stalky purple trees and yellow shrubbery. The void stretched above and below with no end in sight (or perhaps nothing but End in sight), yet Alice didn't think the emptiness was so bad now that she had a clear view of their surroundings.
Matthew nervously grinned. "We'll take it one step at a time. And… in any case, we've made it. We've really made it…"
Alice took a deep breath of the cool, clear air, in disbelief as to just how far her adventure had taken her. She may have been fighting an invasion, and there was still danger ahead, but as she took in the sights in that moment, she realized she'd never felt more fulfilled in all her life.