(We're actually making better time than I expected. I'm going to try and have the next update for you fine folks by 2/7/24)

Chapter 152: Midnight's Deep

The bony beasts wearing their cloaks of power closed in upon them from all directions.

"Here!" Cletienne cried, and Alma threw herself towards him just as the monster wrapped in burning orange light lunged after them both. The creature stabbed spear-like fingers towards Cletienne: Cletienne flung out his staff, and the fingers scraped against a wavering wall of golden light. Fire flowed from the tips of those bony fingers, spilling hot embers down between the creature and the barrier.

The second figure—the one in crackling white—leapt high into the air above them, then crashed downwards. Too many limbs struck in lightning-laced blows: each was reflected by Cletienne's wavering barrier, but each one also staggered him, so he was actually falling backwards with every strike. Alma moved with him, too terrified to reach out to hold him.

The third shape, with its uneasy aquatic aura, stepped into the mud. The way it stepped, the way it moved, the way it gestured—it seemed less misshapen than the other two, more approximately humanoid in outline, even if its limbs were mismatched and its ugly minotaur-skull head sat neckless on a too-thin torso. The mud around it stirred as though things were moving within it: tendrils of water began to unfurl from the quagmire.

"Watch out!" Alma cried.

Cletienne's head whipped between the white-clad monster raining blows upon them from above and the tendrils rising from the blue-clad beast. He hissed between his teeth, then thrust his staff up as though it were a spear: the golden light convulsed, flung the lightning-beast back, then settled into a shimmering dome of golden light, like a mage's arrow ward.

The blue-cloaked creature cocked its skull head at a quizzical angle. The tendrils began to wrap around the periphery of the dome.

The concentrated malice of the three creatures around her was overwhelming. But in the back of her mind, Alma could still feel the teeming approach of the other creatures—the spectral revenants that Cletienne said would feed on their very souls.

"Hold them off!" Cletienne shouted.

Alma's head swiveled towards him in disbelief. "What?"

"Hold them!" Cletienne bellowed again, shoving his staff towards her. Alma stared between Cletienne and his staff. Even with that staff in hand, she had been too weak to escape him. Now, surrounded by creatures trying to kill them, the weight of her weakness gripped her heart and held her paralyzed.

The creature with the fiery aura gave a creaking roar, and with a crackle like a fresh-fed bonfire, spat a great gout of flame against the side of the barrier; Cletienne trembled with the force of it More and more watery tendrils kept snaking out of the marsh around them, ready to squeeze the life out of them like a kraken out of legend breaking a ship. Just visible through the fire and the steam, the many-limbed lightning beast was circling the barrier, ready to pounce again.

"I can beat them!" Cletienne shouted, white-faced and panting. "But I need time!" He leaned towards her. "Are you a Beoulve, or not?"

A crack of fire, through the ice around her heart.

Alma snatched at the staff. The weight of the spell settled over her, and she gasped as her legs trembled. Saint Above, but there was so much power even in this simple flickering spell, and when Cletienne took his hands away the weight hammered in with redoubled force: she sank to her knees upon the white stone dais, her head swimming with effort-

The watery tendrils squeezed, and Alma felt that grasp like a vise around her heart, pressure choking the life out of her, choking the soul out of her. And those tendrils were only one of the terrible dangers surrounding her, besieging her, closing in for the kill. What was she fighting for? What did it matter if she died now, or died later, when they poured Ultima into her?

Another flash of fire in her heart. So many monsters, moving against her. The ghosts of the dead, these bone abominations, the Lucavi. All of them trying to make her feel helpless. But she was not helpless. She refused to be helpless.

So she staggered to her feet, raised the staff, and slammed its heel into the ground; so she willed, poured all her magic into the dome, fed its light with the flame of her rage: so she unleashed a burst of golden flame in a shout of heat and force, and the water tendrils burst like a pond when a boulder was dropped into it, throwing a rain of droplets in all directions.

"Just a little longer!" Cletienne shouted. She felt his power flexing and fluxing beside her: he had laid out some of the little arrays and objects he used to focus his Summons.

The lightning-beast leapt again, arcs of crackling electricity dancing among the mist she'd created. When its next blow hammered into the flickering dome, it staggered her: she felt that blow inside her skull. Behind the many-limbed monster, the one with the fiery aura was beginning to burn again, a baleful fire that threatened to turn her to ash.

Again. Again. Again. A rain of crackling blows. But Alma endured them, Alma clutched at Cletienne's staff, Alma felt him building power beside him, Alma watched the fire building in the monster beyond them and felt the fire in her heart swell in answer.

When the next blow came, Alma lunged into, poured her power and her will into the staff, and it still hurt, an awful echoing hurt radiating out from behind her eyes, but she shouted into the pain and that shout was also rage and fury. She was Alma Beoulve, by God: she had broken an Inquisitor's spell. She could not equal Lucavi or Archmages, but these shambling things? She could equal them. She could beat them.

So she lunged towards the creature as it lunged towards her, swung her staff like a club, and the dome flashed around her, a wave of golden light that rose from her shout, smashing the lightning-limbed creature up into the air. Behind it, the fire-shrouded beast came striding towards her, slashing currents of fire towards her, and she thrust the staff forwards, answering each blast of fire with a burst of golden light. Explosions filled the air between them, fire vortexing into nothing in fireworks bursts of shimmering gold. With one final thrust, her light broke through, and hammered into the orange-cloaked monstrosity: it staggered backwards.

More tentacles of water rose up around them. Alma's eyes flickered to one side, found the cerulean-cloaked figure with arms upraised. Her head was swimming: the fire in her heart was guttering, her legs shaking beneath her. She felt out of breath, thin and exhausted. She also felt exultant, more excited than she'd been since she faced Inquisitor Zalmour. She had driven all three back.

She slammed the heel of the staff back into the stone, shaking with effort, as the golden dome geysered out from the head of the rune-laden staff. Whipping tendrils splashed harmlessly against it. The lightning-beast and the fire-monster were moving towards her again. But besides her, Cletienne's magic had reached a fever pitch.

"That's Alma Beoulve!" Cletienne bellowed. A rune-edged knife was placed against his palm, ready to slice. "Now I'll show you what an Archmage can-"

And there was light.

It was so bright, so fierce, like wood doused in oil blazing with a sudden spark. The ignition flashed upon them more fiercely than even the columns that had brought the bony monstrosities to life: it was brighter, yes, and deeper somehow, too, darker, and all-too-familiar.

She knew what she was going to see before the light had faded. Where the watery not-quite-human monster had been, there now stood a lion creature amidst a ruin of shattered bone and rippling water. Its mane was sunlight, it leonine figure regal in a purple robe like that of a priest or philosopher. Eyes as hard as stone gleamed from its bestial face, barely visable through the radiance of its golden mane.

It gestured—the curt gesture of a lord, as imperious and irresistible as Dycedarg. And that gesture was will, that gesture was light, that gesture was force: a wall of golden fire unfurled from that gesture, and crashed out around them. The shield Alma had raised was transparent, translucent, delicate as a bubble upon the water: the shield Hashmalum raised was a great blazing flame. She felt the shrieking frustration of the approaching revenants, unable to resist this force, this will. She felt them shrink back from the fire.

Another scream from behind her, mental as much as physical: she snapped around just in time to see a blurred figure flickering at the heart of a constellation of explosions, tearing the fire-shrouded bone beast apart. Another flicker, and Loffrey appeared ever so briefly before disappearing again. The lightning-laced creature crashed into him, and for a moment the two were lost in a tumult of flailing limbs and blurring steel. Then there was a teeth-rattling boom from inside the melee, and the pieces of the last bone creature flew apart.

Alma stared between them—the golden demon, as glorious as it had been with Izlude's blood upon its great clawed hand, and Loffrey Wodring, with a shining sword in his hand and the broken fragments of two monsters around him.

"These gave you trouble?" asked Hashmalum. His voice rumbled like distant thunder, but Alma could hear Vormav even in that great voice—the same wry dispassion.

"I've been traveling for a week, and there were many of them." Cletienne's eyes flickered past the golden flames. "There still are."

"Then we should move along." Hashamalum strode towards the stone dais, casually kicking aside some of the broken bone fragments Vormav and Loffrey had left in their wake. He paused at the dome's edge, humming thoughtfully to himself—a hum so deep she felt it building in the air like a storm, vibrating in her feet.

"You may lower your shield,, Alma Beoulve," Hashmalum said, running one claw along the edge of their dome of light, stirring ripples in its wake. "And move away."

Alma blinked, looked around her at the shield she hadn't realized she was still making, and then relaxed her will. The golden light dimmed down to nothingness: the strength ran out of her legs, and she sank to her knees.

"Loffrey." Hashmalum had hunched over on the edge of the dais, and placed his powerful hands around its edge. Loffrey gently picked her from the ground, and led her into the muck. With one great rumbling heave, Hashmalum shifted the great stone cover to one side, revealing a set of white stone steps leading down into pitch-black dark.

"Go," Hashmalum grunted. "I will replace the cover and follow."

Cletienne nodded, and stopped in front of Alma. "Thank you," he said, as he reached for his staff.

Thanking her. He was thanking her. Her captor was thanking her.

She should be outraged. She should be indignant. She should fight back now, with all her strength.

And what would be the point? She couldn't win. And even if she could, there were other monsters to deal with. Behemoths, and minotaurs, and revenants. Monsters around her. Monster above her. Monsters below.

She let him take the staff, and allowed herself to be led down into the dark.

The stairs descended for a long time, closely walled in rough stone. Cletienne led from the front, with a faint light atop his staff to illuminate their way. Somewhere behind and above them, they heard the stone cover slide back into place with a rumbling clink. It was another minute or two before Vormav rejoined them, now in human form. He had two muddy packs, one slung over each shoulder.

Finally, the stone walls spiraled away, and the white stone stairs descended down a dozen more steps before reaching a floor of rougher stone that stretched in all directions. The stairs they'd stepped from seemed to have emerged from a stalactite, hanging down from a ceiling that was so far above them it was lost in the shadows beyond Cletienne's light.

"Any more of them?" Cletienne asked.

Alma closed her eyes. She was so tired that she hadn't even noticed: the pain in her head was gone, and so were the distant screams. "No.

"I would not trust her senses," Vormav grunted. "The stone here mutes magic."

"Why?" Cletienne asked.

"Here Labyrinthos ends, and the Deep begins." He paused. "There may be...worse things in these warrens. Before we reach Pandemonium."

Alma blinked slowly. "You...said that name...before."

Vormav smiled grimly. In the faint light of Cletienne's staff, the lines of his face looked carved from darkness. "You should recognize it. You spent long enough in convents and monasteries."

Alma frowned at that. Was he saying that Pandemonium had some religious connotation? But what?

While she wracked her brain trying to remember, Vormav frowned around them once more. "We should rest here. Gather our strength. We'll see anything coming long before it arrives...whatever direction it might come from."

He unslung the bags from his shoulders and dropped them to the ground, waving away Loffrey and Cletienne as they moved to help him. Loffrey and Cletienne took a seat on the white stone steps. Alma sat beside them. They watched Loffrey prepare their makeshift camp in a kind of daze.

"You made good time," Cletienne finally said. The light on the top of his staff was dimming and brightening in slow, unsteady waves.

Loffrey grimaced at him. His eyes were half-lidded with exhaustion. "Funny."

"How are things...in the world?"

Loffrey shook his head. "As well as they can be." He turned his grimace towards Vormav. "Someone had me running him across half the kingdom."

"Why didn't you just teleport?" Alma asked.

"Two reasons," Vormav replied. "The first is that there are certain people I do not want asking too many questions. Such as the Confessor. The second is that I cannot teleport."

Alma blinked. "I've teleported with you."

"You moved through the Underside with me," Vormav said. "Did it seem instantaneous to you? Besides...moving that way poses its own risks, and comes with its own costs." He stood up from the bedrolls, dusting his hands off. "Drink. Eat. Get some rest. I'll keep watch."

She rose alongside Cletienne and Loffrey. The food was fresher than the stale rations she'd been eating with Cletienne the last few days—the bread was still soft, and there were two small bundles of vegetables, dried meat, dried fruit, and cheese that had retained much of their flavor. They ate slowly at first, then faster and faster, as the breadth and depth of their hunger and thirst came to the surface. They drank from their canteens greedily. As their hunger and thirst slackened, tiredness replaced both: they sank onto their bedrolls, and slept.

Alma was unsure how long it was she slept, before pressure in her bladder and bowels awoke her. With Cletienne asleep, the darkness of the Deep was absolute. Alma rose uneasily to her feet. Finally, she whispered, "Vormav?"

His answer was immediate: "Yes?"

"Where should I...go?"

Vormav chuckled. "Behind the stairs. There's rags if you need them."

Alma was not sure she'd ever had quite such a nerve-wracking experience while relieving herself. She fumbled through the darkness as though blind, finding her way behind the stairs mainly by feel. And every moment she spent squatting, she felt terribly vulnerable. There had been so many monsters and beasts up above: who knew what waited here below?

But nothing emerged from the darkness, and when she'd finished she returned to the campsite, feeling her way around the stairs to find their bedrolls.

She lay back down upon her bedroll, and found she couldn't sleep. The terror was still fading, and she'd lost the worst of her exhaustion. So she stared up into the darkness, and thought.

"Pandemonium," she said aloud, when she had finally remembered where she'd read it.

"Yes?" Vormav answered.

"It's...the place Lucavi come from." She'd finally remembered the passage from the Balias Gospel, where Balias recounted the Lucavi the Saint and his Disciples had faced in Gallione, and how it had emerged from Pandemonium, summoned by Ydoran sorcery.

Vormav chuckled again. "I was surprised it took you this long to make the connection." He paused a moment. "But that passage has been misinterpreted. When Ajora and his allies faced Exodus in Gallione...Balias knew the place he had come from. Exodus used to run it."

"The Lucavi?" Alma shook her head. "So what is it?"

"Half-prison, half-laboratory," Vormav answered. "When the Ydorans found a creature too dangerous to be mastered, but too interesting to be destroyed, they kept it there. The rest of the Deep was built around it and upon it...to provide a place to test what was learned there, and to make sure that any would-be escapees could be caught long before they could return to the world." He paused again. "Some Lucavi were imprisoned there, in ages past. I was among them. But that time passed long before the Fall. Most of us served the Empire." His voice had turned wistful. "Most of us."

For a little while, neither of them spoke. Alma stared up into the absolute darkness. The same sense of daunting scale was with her—of time, and of power. Vormav remembered a time of marvels and miracles. Vormavs remembered a time when such monsters as he had served a still-greater power. The power that had built this strange place...and had warped souls themselves to do their will.

"Can you see in the dark?" Alma asked.

"I would not be much of a watchman if I couldn't."

"As well as you could in your..." She searched for the right term. "Other...shape?"

A moment's silence. "No. The...anchoring body is enhanced with the strength of the Lucavi...but it is still confined to human limitations."

"So why not...change?"

Vormav chuckled once more. "Why does Cletienne not walk around with every Summon he can command? Why does Loffrey not spend his whole life racing from one place to another? Why did you not simply smite the fiends you faced where they stood?" His voice turned solemn. "All power comes with cost. My power is greater than most: I can afford to pay costs few others can. So it is for all of my siblings. But my power is not without limit. No power ever is."

Alma tilted her head towards the source of his voice. At length, she said, "He did, you know. Cletienne. When we walked in, he had Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, and Titan."

Vormav sighed. "Of course he did. No wonder he was so tired." After a moment, he added, "You did well against the fiends."

"Says the Lucavi who obliterated them."

"A human form has human limits." Vormav sounded wry.

Alma stared after him. "Cletienne told me a little...about the...revenants. But the bone things...the fiends...what are they?"

"Like a revenant crossbred with a Worker," Vormav answered. "The soul is separated from the body, but is denied even the hungry desperation of a revenant. It is confined to some mortal shell, but that shell cannot move unless it is activated by magic. In that moment, all the rage and fury of the trapped soul is given an outlet."

Alma shuddered. The revenants had been bad enough. The fiends were worse. Living souls, made into weapons. Worse, it had worked. She had felt the pointed malice of those creatures, their desperate, flailing rage.

"The Ydorans were monsters," Alma whispered.

"Yes." There was a sadness in Vormav's voice so deep it shocked her: she sat up in her bedroll, squinting after him as though that would dispel the darkness.

"Vormav...Hashmalum..." She struggled with his demon name, but tried to keep her voice steady. "Were you...there? During the Judgment?"

Vormav did not answer. Eventually, Alma laid back down upon her bedroll, and stared up into the dark until it was supplanted by sleep.

Into her drowsing darkness, and dreams of souls and Judgment and a nightmare maelstrom, a gentle hand shook her shoulder. "There will light in a moment," Loffrey said. "I recommend you close your eyes tight."

Alma nodded, and shut her eyes tighter. Even so, the gentle glow of Cletienne's staff felt as bright as staring into the sun: she squeezed her eyes as tight as they would go, rolling away from the light.

"Arise, Alma Beoulve," Vormav intoned. "We near our journey's end."

Alma grimaced, but reluctantly stood up, and risked slitting her eyes. Nothing had changed in the huge stone cavern: worn stone and oppressive darkness hung in all directions, barely kept at bay by Cletienne's newly-raised light. She rolled up her bedroll, and handed it to Loffrey, who quickly finished packing it with their supplies. By the time her captors were finished, there were four packs, one for each of them. They handed her the smallest of the packs, and began their march into Midnight's Deep.

The tension in them was different this time—Alma knew exactly how dangerous this darkness was, unlike the first tunnel she'd taken alongside Cletienne to enter the Deep. But between Hashmalum, Cletienne, and Loffrey, she felt she had nothing to fear. And even if she did, well...she wasn't helpless, either. She could fight. She'd proved that.

So she marched on, ready for whatever danger this darkness might hold—whatever behemoth, whatever dragon, whatever horror of the Ydorans that might be waiting for them.

But hours passed, and they saw nothing. The darkness was empty of enemies. Of life.

"Hashmalum," Loffrey said, casting a wary look about their little circle of light from his place at their rear. "This...should be a biome, like the others. Shouldn't it?"

Vormav held his silence at the front of their group, marching steadily downwards. Finally, he answered; "It should. But now that I think about it...perhaps I was wrong to think so."

Cletienne raised his head. "You mean...Elidibus?" The excitement in his voice was childlike.

Vormav nodded slowly. "I believe so. He secured the upper floors after we last spoke...and has spent his time here..."

"Doing what?" Alma asked.

"Testing himself," Vormav replied.

Alma shook her head. "Testing himself?"

Vormav was silent a moment longer. "You will see."

They camped again, awoke again, marched again. The grey stone and its darkness stretched on endlessly. Alma's legs ached with strain.

And then...there was a glow.

It started out, down and ahead of them, as they wound down a gentle slope. The farther they descended, the brighter the glow grew. Soon, it was bright enough to illuminate the immense, spiraling ramp they'd found themselves on, winding steadily down to where the lilac glow was coming from. The farther they descended, the brighter the glow.

At last, the ramp reached its bottom, and the rough stone of the caverns they'd wandered through was replaced by the smooth white stone of an Ydoran road. The source of the light lay ahead of them just visible through a great stone archway, carved into the grey cavern walls. Alma stumbled to a halt on trembling legs, and stared at the source of the light.

It reminded her a little of Orbonne: the same polished white stone, the same curves and angles to suggest a place of religious majesty. But where Orbonne's great dome was weathered and cracked, the enormous structure before was strong and serene, untouched by time. And this building was larger by far then Orbonne (though perhaps, she mused, not if you counted the catacombs beneath the old monastery). And the stone of the temple before her glowed: a deep, lovely radiance, soft as morning sunlight.

So distracted was she by the building and its light, it took her a moment to notice the ruin spread out before it—here broken bones that, were they whole, would have been longer than she was tall, splintered amidst craters; here a metal limb shaped like a human arm, missing most of its fingers; here an ancient stain of noxious green that was as wide as the lake she'd seen when they first entered Labyrinthos. There were craters, deep fissures, old scorch marks, and spots of glass. The temple before them looked untouched: the road that stretched before it looked like an ancient battlefield.

"Behold, Pandemonium," Vormav said. "Prison, laboratory, archive. Whatever the Ydorans could not yet control, they interred here, to learn how it could be mastered. Here were some of the mightiest marvels of our world locked away, until they could be made to serve." She heard the creaking age in his voice, and the sorrow.

"And...all that?" Cletienne's voice had the same note of childish glee as he gestured to the ruins in front of the temple.

Vormav glanced back at him. "Elidibus." He turned fully to face them. "Should we face any of the monsters of Pandemonium, we may be sorely tested. There were things imprisoned here during the Fall that even I would have struggled to kill. And compared to them-"

He broke off, as naked terror filled his face. She understood that terror, because she felt it, too. Felt something moving towards them that made her skin feel tight and hot, and her blood run cold.

It may have moved in the real world, the waking world, the one she could see with her human eyes. But it moved more significantly than that—it moved in the other world, the one that abutted the Maelstrom, the world where she'd felt the whispering screams of the revenants and the Marquis' last, desperate plea. The enormity of that movement shocked her: she felt the sheer presence of that soul battering against her. And it was coming closer all the time.

"Watch out!" Vormav roared, almost too late: there was a flash of light, and a great wave of fire came crashing down upon them. But Cletienne was fast: he whirled towards the flame, snapped up his staff and caught it against the head. His teeth were bared in a savage grin: his eyes burned almost as hot as the flames he mastered.

With one quick gesture, the flames whorled into a new shape—the demonic figure of Ifrit, with its skin of fire. He raised his staff to command him forwards-

A blurring burst of movement: she knew it was Loffrey now, moving the same way Clara had moved, bending time itself to serve him. She had seen him fight like this just once, when he had torn the bone creatures to shreds far above their heads. But when she movement settled this time, Lofrrey was caught around the throat, held aloft by a powerful arm, attached to a powerful man.

He was powerful in body as well as soul. He was old—she could see that well enough, in how wrinkled he was. He was naked, and thickly muscled, and his worn skin was also densely marked with old scars and healed burns. Tuffs of matted grey hair concealed his penis, shrouded his worn face, danced wildly atop his head. Wrinkles, muscles, and old scars gave him a gnarled solidity, so that he seemed as battered—and yet enduring—as an ancient oak tree.

That was what she saw with her eyes. To her other senses, he simply burned. He had all the same thick, too-deep power of the Lucavi, but there was nothing of shadow in him. If Hashmalum was a bright as a noonday sun, then this man was as hot as a summer day. He blazed so fiercely, so insistently, that she felt something in her wilting just from being exposed to him. He was a bonfire in human form.

Casually, he tossed Loffrey away from him. Loffrey landed in an ungainly heap, scrambled to his feet and shied backwards with his sword held en guarde. The wild man with the wild power lifted his head, and the wild eyes burned as hotly as his magic beneath his wild hair. "You will have to do better than that, Time Mage."

"Hold, Elidibus."

It was the demon's voice: Hashmalum's voice, layered with power. Alma was surprised to see that the lion demon stood among them once again: his transformation had been masked by the sheer, stunning force Elidibus carried with him.

There was a rush of air: that force was suddenly beside her, and she cried out and staggered back from them. Elidibus had appeared as though he had teleported, right in front of Hashmalum. His right hand was curled in the lion's purple robe: his left held onto a wooden staff as gnarled as he was. At its top was a curious headpiece of woven wood and lurid green.

"You don't give me orders, Vormav," Elidibus said softly. "I let you go once. But I told you what would happen, if you ever came to bother me again."

Hashmalum's eyes locked with Elidibus'. He made no move to defend himself. "I come to bargain."

"Bargain?" Elidibus laughed. "With what?"

"With her."

Elidibus' eyes flickered towards her, and Alma took another staggering step backwards. She could not describe the color of those eyes. She was not sure they had color: it was all lost in the power of him. The mere act of him focusing his attention on her focused his magic, too: she felt pinned in place by the force of his gaze.

"Who is she?" he asked.

"Alma Beoulve." Vormav paused. "She is attuned to Virgo."

Elidibus blinked. Then he grinned—a wide, hungry grin, framed by his knotted silver beard. The power he wore retreated: it was as though a pot of boiling water had been taken off a stovetop, so that it did not roil and steam so fiercely. But she could still feel the heat of it, oh yes. And she knew how easy it would be for him to start boiling again.

"Alright," he said. "Let's bargain."