There was a discontinuity, a vast crack in the conflux of time and space, and suddenly he was somewhere else.
The disorientation kicked in the second Zendar began to move; intense nausea hitting him like a rail gun report, causing him to keel over and empty his guts of its contents. An afterglow of light faded away from his body as he straightened up, wiping a trail of slime from his lips with the back of a sleeve.
“What are you doing here?”
In a flash, the catan was out and arcing through the air as he swiveled on the owner of the voice. A wing of razor-edged steel cut his attack short, and a follow-up sweep of another wing made him roll to one side, coming out of the move in a crouch. The angel of blades folded her wings back as she took a step closer to him, her grim line of a mouth visible under the darkness of her hooded robes. “What are you doing here?” She repeated, with an added edge in her tone that promised bloodshed.
“Mithra sent me,” Zendar replied simply as he stood up.
The angel snorted. “He’s sent lots of fools down here, and not one of them’s ever come back.” She gestured toward a nearby pile of ash with a broken blackened skull resting on top of it. “Like this guy here.”
“Huh.”
“And don’t you ever call my father by name again.” The grim line became an angry scowl.
Zendar ignored that remark by reaching into a pocket and drawing out the map machina again. Eldritch green-blue light filled the cold dark musty room that they stood in, as the holographic map occupied the space between them. “This place isn’t on the map.”
“It’s old. Part of the original castle fortification before father remodeled it long ago. He said it used to be a playground for the ancients with aura-locks in place to prevent any spatial reengineering.” The angel reached out to touch a section of the map, expanding it under magnification. “We’re beneath here, in one of the holding cells. There’s a place under the old throne room called the Warden’s Quarters. That’s where the Burnt King is.”
“Show me how to get there.”
“You,” she snarled. “Are not going anywhere. Father has wasted too many lives on this, and it’s time one of us did something about our own problems. Get lost, small fry.”
She turned to leave, and he sheathed away his blade. “If I go back,” Zendar said slowly. “Should I tell him that you were here without his permission?”
She stopped before the cell’s anachronistic barred door, trembling with indignation and a little fear. “I’m not a child to be coddled anymore,” she snapped over a shoulder.
The golem remained silent and folded his arms.
“Damn you.” She took a loud deep breath to calm herself down. “Don’t blame me if you find a death down here that no Mobius can bring you back from. The name is Sylph.”
With that, she opened the door to the cell. Zendar followed in her wake.
The cell opened out into a long hallway, with other cell doors interspersed at regular intervals along on both sides of it. The hallway was slanted at an ascending angle, with a staircase at the end of it that led upward. Torches bearing tongues of reddish-orange flame sputtered in sconces along the walls of the corridor, burning with a greasy oily stench that smelled horrid. Holes in the stony ceiling overhead brought chilly air from above that failed to circulate out the ever-present musty old scent of death that pervaded everything. More ash covered the floor beneath them, with the party’s feet and boots leaving imprints in the undisturbed residue from uncountable ages past.
“This way,” the angel named Sylph called without looking, and started heading for the stairs. Zendar loped after her with a grunt, his sensors running silent scans of everything within ten feet of him. Sylph had been right about the locks; they were everywhere, arranged in strange, almost alien patterns on every available surface like an invisible tattoo. Whatever structure that the dungeon had been originally part of, its makers had clearly wanted nothing to be changed.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works ye mighty, and despair,” Zendar muttered under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he answered.
Sylph swore.
They emerged from the stairs and found themselves on one end of a bridge leading deeper into the dungeon complex. The narrow stone walkway was suspended over a yawning chasm, with a strange smoky breeze wafting out of it in waves, smelling strongly of soot and charcoal. Pillars rose out of the deep dark pit, running alongside the bridge with intervals between each pillar, bearing hissing tongues of flame in open braziers that lit the way before them in dancing flickering light. Zendar’s sensors could pick up nothing in this space, only thin whispers of sound that seemed to come from all directions around them.
Sylph looked her shoulder at him. “C’mon.” She started to walk along the bridge, her wings twitching nervously behind her. Feeling an all too familiar uneasiness, Zendar began to follow her…
…and then the catan activated with a double click.
“Wait!” He called after her, but it was too late.
From the pits below, the chirals attacked.
She awoke first within a private network node, feeling like a man who had just awoken from a coma.
“Ms. Kaki?”
Ayn blinked away her confusion, feeling a phantom pain in a side of her brain that she guessed was coming from her body in the base reality. She discovered that she was seated in a train car, a streak of indistinct colors speeding past the windows close by to her right. Her bodysuit was gone, replaced instead by a period dress in grey and red. Her mantle had been equally changed by whatever logic underlying the node’s aesthetic algorithm; it was now a simple white shawl.
“Ms. Kaki?”
She turned to the only other occupant of the car she was in; her gaze fell on a little boy, hardly older than Takuro’s child from her deceased K10Y0 home, in the seat opposite hers. Like her, he wore a period outfit and carried a golden pocket watch on a metal chain that rested in his pudgy hands. The boy’s eyes, a beautiful pale blue, were glowing as he smiled at her.
“I’m glad you’re awake. You were really hurt when nee-san brought you in.”
She looked around a little. “Why am I here?”
The smile grew smaller by a fraction. “Nee-sama wanted to talk to you, but the Mobius wasn’t finished. He said that it was urgent.”
“Where’s Zendar?”
“Nee-sama sent him to the bad man’s place.” The boy shuddered with fear. “I don’t like that place.”
For a moment, anger flashed through her like a lightning bolt, and some of the emotion must have shown through, for the blue-eyed child flinched. “Sorry. I was thinking about something. What’s your name?”
“I’m Sraosha.”
“Sraosha…is your big brother here? Can I talk to him now?”
The smile lingered for a moment, then faded away. “Okies.” The boy closed his eyes, and sighed. A second later, his features began to blur and warp at tremendous speeds, lengthening out into a grow-up’s body in the space of seconds. A moment later, a middle-aged man with the first signs of grey in his hair sat in the boy’s place, rubbing at his temples.
Ayn stood up. At the back of her mind, old tools and tricks burned with the urge to be used. “What have you done with my friend?” She hissed dangerously.
The strange man held up both hands as if to ward off her fury. “Now now, there’s no need for that. Shindo went of his own volition. He accepted a task from me in return for our aid in healing your damaged corporeal form. It is the castle’s inviolable law to allow such an exchange, so there’s nothing you can do about that.”
Ayn scowled, and then dropped back into her seat with a huff. “Tch. Fine. Then let me out of here.”
“In a base reality minute, Kaki-dono.” The man sat back in his seat. “Forgive my rudeness for the lack of an introduction. I am Mithra, the current administrator of Durza’s Tower. You’ve just met one of my assistants, Sraosha. There is another, Rashnu, who handles site security in the base reality, and one more…a woman named Sylph.” Here he paused, looking both sad and slightly proud at the same time. “She’s my daughter. Not by birth of course.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Mithra looked away for a time, saying nothing. When he looked back at her again, there was an angry glint behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “You’re from Keres Outpost, yes? My intelligence network does not extend so far out from here, but I occasionally find things out from time to time.” The anger shone more clearly. “The abomination your people have unleashed on this world…it has been stalking you.”
Ayn’s eyes flew wide. “What?”
The answer popped into existence inside the node in the form of multiple flat windows of light, showing her the same view from many angles and across the electromagnetic spectrum. A swarm of microscopic insects were attacking an invisible wall in the air over a graveyard, their constant Brownian motion revolving around set paths that provided the suggestion of shape; large bat-like wings, thick corded muscle and hungry golden eyes.
“Moby Dick comes for Captain Ahab,” Mithra remarked with an ironic smile. Then he sighed, and there was a deep seated weariness in the sound. “We were supposed to leave this…prison…long ago via Chinvat. But my daughter is gone. All attempts to locate her have failed and yet…I believe I know where she has gone.” He took off his glasses for a second, wiping away at them with a guilty expression on his face.
Ayn caught on quickly. “She’s where Zendar is, isn’t she?”
Mithra nodded. He put on the glasses again as the vidstream windows flickered and died. “I currently find myself in the uncomfortable position of asking of a stranger’s help. She is blocking all my attempts at communication…has been avoiding them for some time now. And Shindo is currently too far deep in the dungeon for my transmitters to be of any use. So I ask of you, Ms. Kaki, will you help find my daughter before it’s too late?”
They sat in silence as Ayn mulled over the question. She had no reason to trust the old man’s words, and yet she found some part of herself worrying, empathizing with the unspoken note of concern in his voice when he spoke of his daughter. There was only one decision to be made, she realized, and it had already been made for her.
The network node’s boundaries shimmered for a moment, exposing her briefly to the sea of data that flowed beyond it. “The outermost defenses are down,” Mithra remarked offhandedly, looking off to the side at something that was happening elsewhere.
The scientist grinned. “You said this place needs a favor for a favor, right?” The old man slowly nodded. “Do you have any weapons? I’m going to have to put in a few upgrades…”
The enemy came at them in waves; first in ones and twos that were cut down faster than they could strike, then in packs of more than ten, twenty, thirty.
The angel held her own along with the young golem, her wings sweeping back and forth in a defensive wall even as she struck with the pair of swords in hand, plucked from the extra limbs. Her hood had come off in the fight, revealing a red-haired pretty face with a blank metal slate in place of her visage’s upper half. Despite their combined strengths, the endless surge of monsters was starting to tax them. A series of bloody rents in the left shoulder of Sylph’s robe was evidence of the time when she had failed to move quickly enough to avoid the bite of a chiral. Zendar had a wet ragged hole where his left eye used to be, and his right arm was gone from the elbow down, consumed by one of the n-tech monsters.
And yet he felt nothing in the hazy void of the combat subroutine as he sliced through a pair of chirals lunging at him from the rear. A diagram in a corner of his view indicated areas of the body where he was badly damaged. In a red-tinged dialog box floating before his eyes, words and figures gave him a grim estimate as to how long before the rest of him would have to power down in order to avoid overworking the body. The figure kept constantly updating itself with each chiral death, each successful attack that connected with him, making the numbers a blur of white light in his sight.
The numbers were against them, badly. Dimly, he registered the fact that they were being pushed further and further past the bridge and into the place that held the Warden’s Quarters. The walls here were scorched black and pressed closer to them, forcing the chirals coming in from the front into a bottleneck, while others from behind and to the side somehow found ways to sneak up on the pair of warriors. Zendar skewered one such individual as it tried to claw the legs out from beneath him, the catan singing as it sheared the beast in half with a single stroke. The chalky residue from its rapidly degenerating corpse rained over its companions as they surged in through the space created by their fallen.
“Damn it! Damn it all!” Sylph howled over the seething stream of monsters.
An opening presented itself in the augmented vision, and Zendar took it by running headfirst into the mob, the catan in his left hand swinging and slashing and slicing through several bodies at once with inhuman speed. Clearing a brief space around himself, he turned to the wall behind him and stuck at it three times with the blade, and kicked at it. A section of the façade crumbled before the blow, revealing a rectangular hole leading into a side passage that was lit by lines of orange crackling light.
“Sylph! This way!” He called out to his companion even as he cut down a pair that attempted to take him down in a lunge.
She carved a swathe out of the horde as she approached, but her movements were less crisp, unprecise and slower than before. A chiral jumped at her, landing on her back in the space between her swings, its claws digging deep into her flesh. Sylph let out a strangeld cry as she tried to shake off the beast, but only managed to open herself to several bites and scratches from the other monsters swarming around her. She leaped into the air, breaking her wings out in burst of motion that sent her soaring upwards into the ceiling, squashing the monster hitched to her back flat. Sylph dropped down near the golem, landing in jerky halting stop on the other side of the hole. Zendar waved his sword at a quartet of chirals, driving them back, then jumped into the hole in the wall. A moment later, a surge of lightning-like energy crackled around the hole, then the cut out slab slammed back into place as the aura locks activated.
Wiping the line of sweat on his brow, Zendar sheathed the catan temporarily, feeling a deep weariness trickle in past the shield of his combat subroutine. He turned to his companion, only to find that she lay on the floor like a discarded child’s doll, twitching and spasming. Her back was covered in a dirty grey sticky syrup that was a combination of the chiral processed black tar and the chalky remains of a dead one. One wing was gone, reduced to a shrinking stump on her back by the monsters beyond the wall. The flesh around the bite on her left shoulder had swollen, becoming a puffy purplish bruise that oozed a yellow liquid that smelled sickly sweet. Her left arm was starting to warp and mutate, changing into claws.
He needed no scan to tell him what was happening. “You’re infected.”
Sylph forced herself to sit up, biting back on cries of agony at the torture her body was undergoing. She pulled out a vial of some acid green liquid from her the pocket of her robes, downing the contents with shaky hands. She coughed violently as the substance went down, grimacing in pain. She looked at him with that eyeless face. “It’s a test drug, made by father. It’s not a cure, just a temporary reprieve.” She stood up, faltering at the last minute until Zendar caught her by the arm. “Thanks. C’mon, we’re close to the Burnt King’s lair. The aura locks won’t hold those bastards for long.”
She led the way, shuffling along on wobbly feet. Zendar cast a glance back at the wall behind them, saw the smoke and crackles of energy rising off the stones as the chiral swarm tried to chew their way in. He fell into step beside the angel of blades, giving her a look that suggested his willingness to help but she ignored it and kept on walking. Silently he scanned her, and the sensors returned a brief estimate; in approximately six minutes forty-two seconds, the chirals would completely corrupt her. Already her aura was a white hot nova-like nimbus around her as her body was devoured from the inside out.
“Quit the scans,” she barked at him without looking. “I know it’s bad, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it. Just…be ready. When the time’s up…” Her voice trailed off as she left the rest unspoken.
The newfound shortcut led them downwards and further on into the dungeons. The air grew warmer, verging on sauna-hot as they descended. The only lights now were dots of orange like burning cinders set into the walls around them, glowing dimly like distant stars amongst the blackened fire-gutted structures. Zendar kept the combat subroutine running at the back of his mind as a measure to regulate his body against the rising temperatures, but even then he had to wipe away the accumulated sweat beading on his forehead every few minutes or so. Sylph hardly seemed to notice; she kept muttering to herself under her breath, a spasm running through her frame with every five steps or so. Her transformation was accelerating by the second, becoming more and more apparent on the visible bits of her flesh. Already the skin near her lips had grown a lattice of dark purplish veins that throbbed in time with a tic on her arms, and her sole remaining wing was starting to shrivel.
<ESTIMATED TIME: FIVE MINUTES AND THIRTEEN SECONDS> flashed the words across his peripheral vision.
The passage led into a wide, open space that was at least fifty feet across in diameter. The ground here was covered in a layer of fine ash, the walls scorched pitch black, lending to the impression that they stood in a vast field of grey. In the center, a high-backed throne rose up from a short ramped dais, and seated atop it was the tall regal figure of a man, his flesh as dark as the void between stars. A ragged, tattered robe stained with soot covered him, but in places the light ancient armor he wore showed through. Wispy vestiges of hair spilled out of a broken crown, and a broken blade rested on his lap. The figure sat with his head on a fist like a man bored, his eyes shut. The very air around him seemed to roil and twist like the shimmers on the horizon on a hot day.
“The Burnt King,” Sylph rasped. Then she collapsed to her knees, coughing up a thick wad of blood. Cracks were beginning to show in her faceplate, and one of her arms had grown longer, more inhuman. “Hey…Zendar,” she wheezed, looking up to her companion. “You should get out of here. I can’t…”
“I’m not leaving you,” Zendar cut her off. He slipped into a battle ready stance, ignoring the sweat that was running freely down his face. His lungs were burning with the ambient radiation every time he breathed now.
The Burnt King opened his eyes then, and they were a pair of glowing ambers in their sockets.
Sylph groaned as she got to her feet. “Get ready,” she mumbled hoarsely past lips that were stained berry red.
With an inhuman roar of rage, the King leapt off his throne, his skin bursting into tongues of flame. Zendar tossed himself out of the way as the burning giant crashed into the very spot he had vacated with tremendous force. The impact formed a crater in the floor, sending ash flying in a maelstrom around the King that vaporized in his fiery glow. Zendar buried himself deeper in the abstraction layer of the combat subroutine to keep from feeling his flesh frying, but even then he knew it was only a delaying action. Medical subroutines screamed at him with the strain of trying to keep up with the buildup of heat damage in addition to the other injuries he had accumulated, making it hard to focus. He another attack from the King with a backward flip, then parried a swipe of the creature’s broken sword. He countered with a double slash, but the King moved fast – too fast for a creature of his size – and drove a flaming fist into Zendar’s midriff that tossed the golem one way, his blade another. Blood-colored spittle left his mouth in a fine spray as Zendar slammed backward into a wall, a ghostly touch of pain blooming at the back of his mind. While he slumped to the ground, he caught sight of Sylph rushing the monstrous being with close-range attacks that the thing evaded with ease. The corruption had spread extensively across her body, but nevertheless she kept her footing and her stance, trading blows with the burning giant. Zendar got to his feet slowly, ignoring the report that informed him that a scorching print of a fist had been burned down his front and looked for his blade. The superheated ash-laden air felt like he was breathing in hot sand, and despite the subroutines running in his system, he could feel a light-headedness creeping in around the edges of his consciousness…
A pained shriek ripped his eardrums. The King had caught the angel of blades in a fell swoop, and held up the tiny thing in a tight, burning fist. Sylph screamed as the flames seared her, chiral corruption and all, helpless in the King’s death grip. With a triumphant cry, the giant squeezed, and with a sickening, very audible pop, broke her spine in half. Then it flung the burning corpse to the ground, which it flattened with a single merciless stomp. Only a pool of black remained when the King lifted its leg.
The giant turned to Zendar, a savage grin twisting the flaming halo that passed for its head. The golem returned its gaze with a defiant expression, his eyes darting to the catan lying a few feet away between them. The King walked slowly toward him, exuding an air of inexorable victory as if it knew that there was no way he could reach the weapon in time…
A flash of light came from behind the golem.
“ZEN, GET DOWN!”
Zendar threw himself to the side at the last possible instant. A coruscating beam of bluish-white energy ripped through space and connected with the burning giant’s head. Zendar thought he heard a cry of relief as the energy beam vaporized the creature’s head, a heavy stinging smell like ozone bringing unbidden tears to his eyes. The beam flickered and died away after what seemed like a lifetime, leaving a large headless flaming corpse standing before the golem. Then the corpse began to topple, disintegrating into smoldering embers long before it touched the ground. Feeling a deep and sudden fatigue that the abstraction layer could not filter out, he turned around to face his rescuer.
“Not bad, eh?” said a somewhat familiar woman with boyish seaweed green hair and a grin on her face. In her hands was a daser cannon the size of a grown man.
When they returned to Mithra’s study, the water was on fire.
“Ah, welcome back Ms. Kaki. Shindo.” Mithra stood on the edge of the cliff, wearing a full coat and carrying a walking cane in one hand. Beside him were Sraosha and Rashnu, with the child equally dressed up like a person about to undertake a long journey. On the distant horizon, the ocean was ablaze, with the fire slowly spreading out and advancing by the minute. The air smelled like death and dust.
Zendar hobbled forward with support from Ayn, holding out a different blade from the catan at his back. “It’s done. The Burnt King is dead. Sylph…didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
Mithra looked from one face to the other, an almost humanly look of shock and dread flitting across his visage. He attempted a grim nod as he lifted Sylph’s sword from Zendar’s remaining hand. “I had sheltered her for so long. I thought…” He swallowed, looking away for a moment. Sraosha looked close to tears. “I will do better in the next world, I swear on her memory.”
“What happens now?” Ayn asked, her troubled gaze drawn to the peculiar phenomenon in the distance.
“You two will be sent far enough away from this place.” Mithra flashed a brief angry look at them. “That is the only thing I can do for you at the moment. I cannot stop the abomination. Even now it is eating away at the walls of the castle like acid, looking for a way in. Once you are out of its reach, it might leave us alone long enough for the Chinvat to activate so that we can leave this wretched soulless world.”
Rings of radiance began to build up around the golem and the scientist. “Where will you guys go?” Ayn asked.
“Somewhere far from Drakonia.” Mithra smiled. “Perhaps somewhere sunny.”
Sraosha waved sadly at them.
Zendar locked gazes with the elderly man. “Farewell, young gryphon. Your story has just begun and the road lies long before you. Take care lest you find yourself becoming the beast you hunt.”
The rings of light flared, then vanished.
Many miles south of the castle, the rings materialized the two companions into being. The pair watched in silence as in the distance, the same rings of light from earlier manifested around the castle. The rings extruded outward, becoming a pillar that warded off the massive swarm of insect-like organisms that appeared to be crawling up the walls of the castle. The pillar became a silent shout of power that streamed into the heavens like a distorted rainbow, slowly fading away over time.
From far off came the roar of some monstrous entity; an abomination robbed of its prey.
“Do you think we’ll see them again?” Ayn wondered out loud after a moment of silence. Her eyes were still glued to the path of light left by the castle’s movement.
“Maybe,” Zendar said. Then he passed out.
The hunt comes full circle! Next: the dynamic duo must separate…?
Gryphon's Nest 2.0 
Ho– Holy Cow… I was literally on the edge my here seat…