The more Felix investigated, the more concerned he became. The gate was like an open wound. Pit had been right, of course. It was nothing like the Shadowgates or even the Dark Passages. Those accessed a liminal space between destinations, skirting the slim margin between the Void and the Continent. When they opened, they opened into some form of darkness, not light. Superficial things aside, it felt different. Felix wasn't sure if it was his Harmonic Stats, his Perception, or some combination of the two, but the wound was like a hole in the world. He could feel it splitting through the Realms, circumventing distance in a way that was unlike any other gate. Wherever it went, it was so far away that the distance was beyond vast.

He tossed more debris inside, watching again as pieces were unraveled. That alone told him enough, but he didn't want to believe it. The Dissonance that flowed through it made him dizzy, and just approaching the thing was enough to make his teeth hurt. In the end, he couldn't deny it any longer. He'd seen its kind before: a hole through reality, where the Realms were destabilized by a whirling white disc that unmade all that touched it.

“Desolation.” A word that the people in the Void used to name for a portal to the Ethereal.

"The Eye can't be telling us to go in there," Pit groused. "That'll tear us apart."

Felix was certain. The Eye had a connection to something on the other side. He could see it as a golden thread when he held up the orb—it trailed from the artifact, a lead of gleaming power that plunged through the center of the white disk. He waved the Eye around but the golden thread remained relatively locked into the gate. If anything, it acted a lot like his blue Bonds or even the silver threads of an Oath.

He glanced at the Eye, reading its info.

Name: Eye of Tumult Type: Path (Enhancement) Lore: All Paths come to an end. Seek the last resting place of the Obsidian Tumult and summon forth your courage, magus. You shall need it.

"I don’t think it’s brave to get dissolved." Felix rotated the Eye, hoping for some other clue on its hammered metal surface. There was nothing, and that only led him to stare up at the whirling white disc above.

Why doesn’t it just eat everything else around it? Pit asked. Isn’t that what they do?

“Even in the Void, the Desolations were only so big. There must be something limiting it.” Felix took his time staring at the gate and its surroundings, as if he could decode how it all worked if he glared long enough. Pit was right. Entering through it would have unmade them as much as the rocks were torn apart, but he refused to believe he’d been led to a doorway he couldn't open. So he sat and he thought. He couldn't speak to Karys or Paxus due to the Dissonant interference, so he had to pull what he could on his own merits.

Unseen Beholder.

He looked directly at the gate, but there was nothing. No resistance or block against his Skill, just emptiness, as if the hole wasn't the work of the System at all. However, Unseen Beholder was more than just a souped-up Analyze.

It was a link to seeing magic itself.

Felix peered closer. The white confluence of all things that the Desolation represented was too much. It was overwhelming to his vision, leaving spots that chased across his retinas as if he’d stared into the sun. Instead, he focused on the edges where thick gray Roots of the Aberrant Soil clung to its lip.

Huh. Those weren't being unmade. He took a stone and tossed it right at the edge. It hit a thick Root and bounced but didn’t fall. It hovered, held between gravity and Desolation as it spun uncertainly…before it was yanked sideways into the gate. Unmade yet again.

“There’s your answer, Pit. I think the Roots are keeping it from growing bigger.”

Really? How come they’re not affected?

“No clue.”

Felix frowned but kept looking, flaring Unseen Beholder all the while, trying to pick apart even a little piece of the gate. He ended up once again at the golden thread connected to his Eye of Tumult. Near the orb, it was faint and hazy, but it gained definition as it approached the Desolation. There, it appeared almost metallic and textured, as if it were several strands all braided together.

He squinted. There was something there. Something wound within the strands of golden thread. Felix couldn’t quite make it out, but it was only right at the edge of the Desolation and nowhere else, as if the gate were pulling the threads apart.

Felix chewed on his lip. "Pit, I have an idea."

Well, that can't be good.

"Just be ready to jump out of my Spirit."

Why?

"...Just in case."

Felix, don't tell me you're going to touch it!

“Of course I’m not. Do I look stupid to you? Don’t answer that.” Felix marshalled Sonata of Dominance, lifting an earthen rampart beneath his feet. He rose higher, approaching the nearly twenty-foot high ceiling at a steady speed. His hand lifted.

He grasped the golden thread, just below the Desolation’s glare.

It burned. Pain scoured across his fingertips and through his nervous system like skewers through his fingernails. His grip tightened, not by choice, but by the currents of power that locked his muscles tight. The golden thread buzzed in his grip like a live wire, arcs of colorless power searing through him, charring his scales until smoke erupted from between his fingers. All at once, it blew him back. Felix skid down his rampart on his ass, his arm twisted and smoking, clearly broken in several places.

“Damn it,” he hissed. Felix gripped his elbow, clenching hard as if that would stop the pain. Sovereign of Flesh did the rest. Essence drained as bone and muscle healed, locking back into place with meaty cracks. The pain cut off.

That was so stupid!

"It worked, didn't it?"

Pit growled.

"You've done dumber stuff."

Yeah, but that's my job. I'm supposed to do the risky stuff. You're the voice of reason.

"Since when?"

Since, uh, forever?

“Sometimes, taking a risk is important. You know that."

Pit opened his mouth, only to grumble. Fine. Next time don’t come crying to me when your arm’s chopped off.

Felix smiled. "Maybe the thread is a dead end, but there’s something hidden in this place. A clue. Look, you can see what I see, right?"

Yeah.

“Flare your Perception. I'm gonna do the same. Let’s see if we can find it together."

Alright.

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Felix started scouring the room, looking for anything. The walls were covered in roots and branches curling inward like stiff hairs, but among them were the leaves. A thick layer of withered Spirit Tree leaves had piled up into the corners and clung like wet rot against Roots and the sloping walls of what Felix assumed was a giant skull.

He swept through them with a gesture, gathering them up with a blast of shaped air that he curved across the space. A second gesture sent the streaming mass upward, right into the pale maw of Desolation. A whirlwind of leaves all vanished, leaving behind bare Roots, branches, and the clustered, brain-like shape that loomed just behind the gate’s glow.

Wow. Look at that.

Scrawled across the walls, once hidden by broken plaster and wet leaves, between the Roots and branches was a mural. It was etched into the bone with exacting precision and clear artistry, though there was no color, only clever hatching and line weights to emphasize shape and distance. A creature he could only assume was Etrionn strode the land. Sigils just beneath it confirmed it, and the beast looked nothing like how Felix had envisioned it.

Clad in gleaming armor and possessing too many legs to count, it was a cross between a crustacean and lizard, as if it had climbed out of a deep, dark sea. A city rose up on its back like the shell of a snail, extending until it covered even its mighty, wedge-shaped skull. Horns sprouted there, coating its neck and jaws like a mane, adding heft to already heavy jaws. Fangs hung through its closed mouth, savage beneath a legion of eyes. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

It was a nightmarish thing…yet Felix couldn’t help but admire it. Etrionn had agreed to carry a city on its back—inside itself, even—and was known throughout legends as a being that brought growth and plenty where it walked. That was evident even in the mural, as fields and forests sprouted behind its tread. Spirit Trees, too, both on its back and around its many feet, their roots mingling among the fields in a way that Felix could only interpret as strong.

The mural went on, though. Felix traced it across the wall. Etrionn was shown again and again, walking unhurriedly over mountains and across plains, through oceans and even into empty deserts, all the while carrying with it growth and fecundity.

But at the far end, almost where the skull looped back around to be lost amongst the knot of the Root brain, he saw another shape. It was a figure very similar in silhouette to Etrionn, but dark. Whoever had carved it had proceeded to burn its shape and nowhere else, darkening its hide as if it were a shadow of the Walking City.

That was the primary difference, but there were others. It carried no city on itself and was all the sleeker for it, and its shoulders and neck were heavier in muscle and horn, while its jaws were open. Fangs bared at the empty sky as if in challenge, and the earth was desolate all around it. Sigils were carved beneath it, caked with dust that Felix had to wipe away. Two words: Obsidian Tumult.

"This is the Tumult?" He looked down with the Eye in his hand. "It seems a bit big for this thing. And why does it look so much like Etrionn? Were they brothers?”

Felix!

"Huh? What?"

Over there! Look out of the corner of your eye.

He followed Pit's directions. Back to where the Halcyon Throne had crashed off to the side. Parts of it had survived contact with the Desolation, though the back of the chair was missing in a clean line. The rest of the two halves were there, a bit broken, but undissolved.

"What exactly am I looking at?"

There, at the bottom! The gleam.

The pieces that remained were tumbled onto their side, exposing the bottom of the throne for the first time. Felix had to walk closer, angling his head as he walked, but he finally saw what Pit had spotted. Carved into its base was the distinct gleam of sigaldry.

He rushed over, sliding to the edge of it as he took in the large half chunk of throne. It was shallow and barely visible, but it was definitely there, complex and almost fractal like many he’d seen before. There was no mistaking it.

It was the Seal of Etrionn.

"Hell yes."

There was a problem.

With painstaking care, Felix had assembled the pieces of the Halcyon Throne and laid them out on the ground. He had scoured the floor of the skull chamber, isolating every speck no matter how small and set them into a pile before slowly reassembling them as best he could. His Magus of the Grand Design and own impressive memory aided the process, helping him identify where the sigaldry should connect or at least make educated guesses. The problem, however, was that bits were missing.

Important bits.

Felix could only assume they’d been destroyed. Either when the Ruin sliced the throne apart or when it had nearly been unmade by Desolation. He also acknowledged that his gale-force leafblower impression had likely sucked up a few chunks of stone, too. That was particularly bitter. Still, his Magus of the Grand Design helped him figure out a lot. He’d seen enough Seals that much of what he was assembling appeared to be fairly universal, and his perfect recall was clutch when he had to decide which way to rotate a piece of shattered stone.

Early on, he’d tried Unite the Lost on the throne, but the Skill didn’t so much as quiver in response. Too much of Etrionn was unaffected by the Ruin for whatever reasons, and without that, the Skill was useless. Instead, he focused on rebuilding the parts he didn’t know.

It was hard. Really hard, especially considering the near-fractal nature of the Seal’s design. The shapes and patterns were recursive, combining sigils in obtuse ways to form shapes that layered over one another at precise angles. They radiated, inscribed in expanding orbits around one another like moons scattered across a planet’s sky.

Felix was sweating ten minutes in. By the first hour, his neck had started to ache from his hunched regard. Another gift of the Crucible.

“Does this go here, or…?” Piece by painstaking piece, he devised and re-inscribed, connecting points to each other in flashes of light as he shaped out the stone. But several gaps remained. Three, precisely. They were fairly large, and he had no clue what would fill them in.

Based on his memories, the Seals of his other Territories were all different in these parts. Felix had to assume that this was a unique marker, perhaps for the location. Perhaps something else entirely. He had no way of knowing.

After three hours of working on it, Felix sat, parched and sweating, his feet aching from where he'd crouched there on the stone. He sat on his rear with an annoyed grunt, ready to just smash the entire thing. A piece chipped off, floating upward toward the desolation. Felix snagged it out of the air, unsheathing his sword and brandishing it at the whirling white disk high above.

"Don't make me come up there!"

The blade caught the light. Felix blinked. There, inscribed on the flat of his Inheritor's Will were glyphs. Of course there were. He'd unlocked them over the course of owning the blade, and they offered different abilities. Etheric Division, allowing him to cut through spellforms and Mana formations. Etheric Unification, allowing him to absorb Nymean Authority through the blade. And Etheric Empowerment, which doubled the range of all effects of his Empyrean Regalia.

Three glyphs.

Felix looked down, staring at the Seal before him and at the lines of the glyphs on his sword. “No fucking way."

He propped his blade against the ground and swallowed. His tongue felt like dry leather in his mouth, but that didn’t matter. Nothing but the Seal mattered. He pointed his finger, mustering Sonata of Dominance to shape the stone before him. He started to inscribe. One glyph after the other cut into the array, line by line forming shapes to perfectly mimic his blade. They filled the three empty spaces, the edges of the glyphs matching perfectly with all the rest.

The moment he finished, the remaining connective tissue of the Seal made sudden, radical sense. The folded bit here and the radiating tertiaries there all fell into place in a matter of moments.

Magus of the Grand Design is level 136!

…

Magus of the Grand Design is level 139!

It was done, and Felix leaned back, releasing a pent-up breath as he massaged his aching neck. He flexed his hands, studying the design, and found no flaw. But the work wasn’t done.

“Now to activate it.” Felix chewed his lip. Normally, he used Unite the Lost to bring back the Seal and provide the boost of power that rejuvenated an entire area. Now, that wouldn't work. Not in Etrionn.

He wasn’t out of options, though.

Felix summoned the Crown and Chalice. The resonance of Crescian Bronze was deafening, but he pushed through it. His recent experience on the stairs had all but trained him for it—what was once an overwhelming deluge became a tinny, inconvenient roar. Deep Mind and Void Sanctuary thrummed, erecting walls that kept its distraction at bay as he reached for the Authority in his Regalia. If his sword let him access Nymean secrets, surely the artifacts of the Herald would let him do this.

The Chalice hummed within him, matching the pitch of his Crown and sending vibrations down to the tips of his toes. A force gathered at the tips of his fingers as a symphony crashed around him.

Do You Wish To Establish Your Authority?

Y/N

There was a movement in the room.

Felix looked up. A figure watched him from atop the tumbled throne. A woman. His breath caught in his throat, his hand already reaching for his sword before he recognized her. Once or twice, he'd seen her in Memories through the eyes of others, but now she looked at him. And she nodded.

Authority Recognized!

Inheritor Status Recognized!

Authority Granted!

The Authority burst free of his hands, arcing across the chamber and striking the seal before him, filling it with golden light.

You Have Claimed The Seat And Seal Of Elysium!

All Hail The Inheritor, Herald of Elysium, Felix Nevarre!

Bare Now Your Soul, Herald Nevarre!

Etrionn, They Who Hold Up The Sky, Judges You.

“Wait. What?”