Something cold dripped down Avery’s spine. “What lived here?”
“I’m ... not sure.”
“But you have an idea.”
“The air has a particular feel, and the crystalline construction of this Dome ...”
“Yes?”
“It could be the Ygrith.”
It took him a moment. “The lost race of gods your people came to this world to find? The ones the R’loth were trying to commune with?”
“I don’t know. I can’t be sure.”
They pushed on through the mist, which was warm and constantly moving, as if alive or directed by something, some machinery, even some mind. Avery couldn’t tell what manner of enclosure they moved through, whether hall or closet or some vast chamber; the mist swallowed up sound so that he couldn’t hear echoes off any wall or ceiling and use that to judge the distance. At any rate, the group didn’t run into any obstructions. Did that mean the area under the Dome was one single room? Was that even possible? It occupied numerous square miles.
Then the mist shifted, and reality broke.
A curtain of purple vapor peeled back, revealing a distant vista, and the group stopped and, as one, sucked in their breaths.
“Fuck a duck,” said Hildra.
In the distance, across blades of grass like thrusts of ebon flesh, reared a great rust-colored mountain, or what at first looked like a mountain, its peak lost in green clouds. But then, to Avery’s horror, he saw the first joint, then the second, and he realized the mountain was no mountain at all, but the protrusion of a carapace of some unimaginable behemoth.
“Gods below,” said Janx.
The mountain shifted, and the sky flashed indigo. A roaring filled Avery’s ears that caused him to stumble back and fall to his knees, and the others stumbled around him.
The mist closed up, obscuring the terrible mountain that wasn’t a mountain, and when Hildra, swearing and weaving from side to side, reeled drunkenly forward to curse the sight, she did not step on ebon flesh-grass but on the same soft, loamy floor they’d been treading on this whole time. The alien world had vanished, if it had ever been.
“I don’t get it,” Janx said, rubbing his ears. Avery still heard the roar in his, and suspected he would for hours to come. The big man looked to Layanna for answers.
“I don’t understand it, either,” she confessed. “Perhaps this place is some sort of gateway, a nexus of dimensions. I don’t know. But that ... thing ... that mountain ...” She was pale. Swallowing, she said no more.
They walked on, and a little later the mist shifted again. This time it revealed a vision of a cracked wasteland, the ground made of what looked like pink terra cotta split by heat or time, and out of the fissures poured a tide of huge spider-like things bristling with ragged feathers. They seemed engaged in a war with a just-arriving enemy, awful shapes winging through the sky, their forms shifting moment to moment and impossible for Avery’s mind to make sense of ...
The mist closed again, concealing the strange world and stranger battle, and the group walked along, muttering and glancing over their shoulders to make sure none of the giant spiders had followed them.
Suddenly, Hildra exclaimed at something, and at first Avery thought it was another vision of an alien world, but then he saw her pointing, and his heart leapt; a line of glowing blooms led off into the mist.
“The ghost flowers!” he said. “We’ve found them.”
“Now all we have to do is follow,” said Layanna.
“Ha!” said Hildra. “In a few moments we’ll be able to kill all those fuckin’ Starfish! Die, Starfish, die!” She clapped Layanna repeatedly on the back. “You ready to drink a bunch of nectar, honey? I knew you liked to swallow.”
Layanna narrowed her eyes. Moving forward, they followed the line of blooms, and then, at last, through swirls of mist, Avery saw another line, and, in the other direction, still another.
“We’re here,” he said, heart beating fast. “We’ve done it.”
Before them, at the junction of a dozen great shoots, rose a gleaming egg-like shape—not translucent like those in the vision but dark and vegetable-like, thick and bloated, perhaps fifty feet in diameter and more than that high. It rose from a hill carpeted in thorny ferns, and overhead floated four strange moons and a smattering of stars that Avery had never seen before. The others exclaimed in puzzlement, and he wondered when the ground beneath his feet had changed. It had either happened very suddenly or so slowly he hadn’t noticed.
“Are we on another world?” said Hildra. “I mean, if this is a gateway or whatever ...”
They looked to Layanna for clarification, but she merely bit her lip and shook her head. She had eyes only for the great egg on its hill.
“This is it,” she said, and her voice was hardly above a breath. “We’re here.”
“That’s what makes my tat glow, eh?” Janx said. “I should have the bastard burned off.”
“Is it responsible for the phenomena of alchemy?” Avery said. “Or part of it? I mean, if it gives off, well, energies, that produce the nectar and other alchemical substances, then this is the source of alchemy, after a fashion.”
“There may be other ruins,” Layanna said. “Other sources. I don’t know.”
“Let’s finish this up,” Janx said.
“Yes. I’ll ingest the nectar. Wait here.”
“But if you drink it …”
“When we get clear I’ll be able to separate the nectar from myself and store it in an organelle. It will be safe there until we return, and when the Starfish arrives I’ll be ready to ingest it and use the abilities it gives me on the creature, assuming the drills can bore a hole in the Starfish’s exoskeleton so that I can reach the thing’s brain.”
“Go on, then, blondie, do your thing,” Hildra said.
Layanna started to take a step toward the great egg—
She stopped suddenly. Avery swore. Of course.
