The damage was both bad, and not as bad as it could have been. Captain Bloodmoon had managed to bleed most of the ship’s speed off using the backup ‘glide’ system and landed on the flattest stretch of mountain she could find. So while the ship had holes in it, the superstructure was intact.

  Tragically several of the crew had been killed, and many were injured, but there were enough priests and healers aboard to deal those hurt, and it was a lot better than it could have been. Melicende had lost two of her people, and Xavier’s various cuts and hastily closed wounds were still giving him trouble, although he was pretending he was fine. But in terms of people who could fight they were in decent shape.

  The one who was taking it hardest was little Aeviexisitrixia. She was teary eyed and subdued, clearly struggling to keep it together. Unfortunately, she was also the only person who had a hope of fixing the ships’ major systems. The elementals had either been blasted apart, or been banished by the safety protocols as they’d crashed. Clawdia could summon elementals too, but the magi-tek principles behind rebuilding the containment systems that had been damaged or broken were secrets that dragons didn’t teach to anyone outside the sorcerers of the Imperial College. None of which they had.

  Aeviexisitrixia said she knew how to fix them, maybe even better than they had been, but she was lacking an essential component for the summoning ritual itself.

  “This is a blood-diamond,” sniffed the little dragon, holding up the shattered remains of a red gemstone. “Or, it was… this is a central component in elemental summoning and binding. We had a whole crate of them, but… but I left the lid open, before crash…”

  She sniffed and crumpled in on herself.

  “They’re all shattered.”

  They were in a large briefing room next to the bridge, which was mostly intact, if unusually dark because the windows that ran along the outer wall were entirely subsumed in snow.

  “You did your best, my Lady,” said Ser Samara gently.

  “If we don’t have any, my Lady, can you produce more?” said Melicende. “Repair this one?”

  “No – you either need to find them, or have a whole specialised facility to make them,” said the little dragon, shaking her head. “I should have closed the crate…”

  “Don’t suppose that sorcerer of yours, Clawdia, has any?” asked Bloodmoon.

  “I very much doubt it,” said Adeena. “I know she can summon elementals, but I haven’t seen her do it in hundreds of cycles. She also has a tendency to trade away her reagents for really stupid things – so if she ever had a blood diamond, it is probably back in Hopesport or something.”

  “If we cannot produce them, then can we find one?” asked Melicende.

  “They have to be mined,” said Aeviexisitrixia morosely. “We’d never be able to find one before… before…” She let out a sob, and turned to Ser Samara. “Sammy, I want to go home…”

  “What about contacting the Imperium?” asked Melicende.

  “We’re far out of transmission range,” said Bloodmoon. “From the top of a peak we might be able to get something faint through, but the only one of us who could scale those cliffs is the Lady and… well, she can’t go out there alone.”

  “No, she cannot,” agreed Ser Samara.

  “Captain, do you have a map, an approximate position?” asked Adeena.

  “Yes, all our charts survived,” said the goblin, crossing to the edge of the room and grabbing a well secured tube from a rack.

  She unfurled a large topographical map of the region that showed the Imperium in the North, and reached as far south as Crowncourt. They were in the lower section, according to the plotted marks, near to Elfwater, although only the first of the adjusted course markings during the battle had been recorded.

  “Difficult to be sure, but we’re somewhere around here,” said Bloodmoon, tapping a section a bit ahead of the last mark, showing them in the mountains to the west of Elfwater.

  “I know this area quite well,” said Adeena. “Or I did – can I borrow this?”

  Bloodmoon nodded, and Adeena brought it with her as she made her way up onto the deck. It was cold outside, and the vast pale snowfield before her showed no sign of melting despite the Dawning sun. Then again, it wasn’t the same sun that had once shone down on these peaks.

  Instead of brilliant yellow, this was the dark sun of the Shadowmeere: a black ball that danced above the curve of the Allfather, shedding pale, unnaturally white light that slowly burned the colour from everything. Here and there, up the ridgelines around them, grey-fur trees that should have been emerald green sat sullenly against black rocks. The ship still had its colour, as did she, but she could see faded patches here and there on the gunwale. If they didn’t repair their ship, if they got stuck here, then by the time the Long Night rolled around they would be pale husks of their former selves. That was the danger of the Shadowmeere, more than the pale, twisted husks that stalked its gloomy wastes.

  She turned her attention from their imminent fading and instead focused on the peaks around her. She had been here before, she was sure of it. It was hidden beneath the snows, but she remembered hiking up this valley as part of a caravan, headed for Draz Lorcha – one of the dwarven strongholds. They’d been attacked by a group of trolls, beneath a cliff, which Clawdia had blasted and nearly crushed them with.

  She spotted the destroyed section and grinned toothily. Yes, she knew exactly where they were.

  “I know where we are, I recognise the geography,” she said, returning to the room and tapping one of the valleys. “Here, not far from Draz Lorcha – a maybe a two hour hike through the snow, just around the ridgeline.”

  “Draz Lorcha?” asked Bloodmoon.

  “One of the larger of the dwarven cities,” said Adeena. “Biggest iron mine in the west. It also had a huge market. I did some work guarding caravans when I was young. Must have done fifty trips up and down from Elfwater. I’m sure we’ll be able to find a Blood Diamond there.”

  “Won’t it all be gone?” said Bloodmoon. “Taken with them?”

  “Dwarves were stubborn buggers– most chose to stay and try and fight the Wyrd,” said Adeena. “Hence why you don’t see many about anymore. And unless the Imperium has already picked it clean…?”

  “We didn’t authorise expeditions to dwarven holdings,” said Melicende. “Too much risk of being trapped away from air support. But… this could work.” She paused, before smirking. “Since she knows the settlement, Captain Yassin’s company is the logical choice for the venture, is it not, Ser Samara?”

  Ser Samara glared at Melicende, although Adeena knew that she wouldn’t be able to protest being left essentially by herself. Adeena very much doubted any of the old sea elves in Melicende’s ranks had been this far west, especially if they’d all been Priests back before the Calamity, and they didn’t have the numbers to both send a second party and defend the downed ship from the Faded horrors that were doubtlessly already snuffling and sniffing around the crash.

  That, and she’d seen the priests and priestesses fight. They were pretty good, and had clearly trained a lot as the temple-guards or whatever they really were, but they didn’t have real battlefield experience. With the exception of Melicende, who was an absolute monster, she very much doubted a group of priests would be able to do better than her company.

  “It does,” said Ser Samara begrudgingly. “I will remain with Lady Aeviexisitrixia and assist her with the ship’s repairs, you and your congregation maintain the perimeter.”

  “Very good,” said the smooth-talking elf, turning and giving Adeena a smile. “I wish you the best of luck, Captain Yassin.”

  Adeena couldn’t help but snorting. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

  “Come now, Captain, don’t be churlish. I am not so proud that I cannot admit that you are more reliable than I feared unknown outlanders would be,” said Melicende. “You have greatly exceeded my expectations, and I have not had the chance to personally thank you for saving my friend, Captain Laurent.”

  “Look… whatever, I don’t care. Just so long as you stop trying to kill me,” said Adeena tiredly. She hated dealing with politicians, people who somehow managed to make you out to be the unreasonable one after three assassination attempts.

  ***

  Making their way over the snow-field was eerie. Virgin snow was white, yes, but not the kind of absolute absence of darkness and colour as the untouched snow within the Shadowmeere. Every step broke the perfect crust and sank her foot up to the ankle, leaving behind it a stark two-tone footprint of alabaster snow and deep, inky shadows.

  “The Captain Adeena Yassin, why did we have to come!?” complained Clawdia. “We hate it here!”

  If it was bad for Adeena and the rest, it was probably worse for Clawdia. Despite her many, many cycles spent on Ruvera, she was a creature of the fey – a world of chaos and emotion and vibrant colour, the polar opposite to the dark, emotionless flatness of the Shadowmeere. Adeena imagined it might be similar to what she felt whenever she entered a temple – a deep, feeling of metaphysical wrongness. Although probably worse, since temples were just places blessed by Elysium, and not actually physical breaches of the realm into Ruvera.

  Here and there large, distributed at random, cracks in the skein of the world led deeper into the Shadowmeere. They steered well clear of them – they’d all see how fast they could contract and expand from above. Although, Adeena noted, these ones seemed to be unusually stable, almost static.

  She very much hoped that there wasn’t one of the tears blocking the way into Draz Lorcha, because there was no guarantee that they be able to find another crack that led back to Ruvera, let alone one that was close to the dwarven city. If they went through one, and it closed behind them, they might never find their way out of the endless realm of darkness.

  “It isn’t that much further, First Lieutenant!” said Heidi, who had her goggles down. “Otto can make out the gates!”

  “We hates it!” hissed Clawdia, angrily kicking a drift of snow. Some kind of twisted husk of what might have once been a rabbit had been hiding in it, and it bolted. It barely made it a few feet, however, before with a crackling roar of thunder Clawdia electrocuted it.

  “Do you mind!?” said Adeena, rubbing her ringing ears. “It was just a rabbit.”

  Clawdia picked the charred corpse up and sniffed at it, then made a face and threw it way. “Ugh!”

  “We’re trying to not attract too much attention,” said Adeena. “Remember?”

  “We thought it might be dangerous,” said Clawdia, cleaning her paw.

  The Firestorm had fallen away behind them as they had hiked up the snowfield, and even at a distance of a few miles it stood out from the washed out surrounds by the vibrant colour of the hull. The Shadowmeere, like the Feywilde, wasn’t the worst of the planes for mortal inhabitants to temporarily visit: not all of its creatures were immediately hostile, but it was still fundamentally inimicable to mortal life, and its denizens were always drawn to the life, emotion, and colour of mortal visitors.

  The bark of cannon-fire from behind them heralded the first of the realm’s monsters, and Adeena turned to see the turrets of the vessel that weren’t wedged in the snow open fire on some blurry, indistinct figure near where the snowfield gave way to the tree line.

  The shot impacted with an explosion of bright blue, a burst of colour in the bleak landscape, and there was a faint, vaguely bestial roar as the distant smudge of creature retreated back into the gloom. They kept their eyes sharp, but beyond a few crows with eyes so black that they drank in the light, they saw nothing as they made their way around the ridgeline.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  By the time that the huge stone entranceway came into view, flanked by two enormous statues of dwarves wielding hammers, Adeena was already starting to feel the effects of the Shadowmeere. It wasn’t tiredness, it was a sense of slowly creeping despair, as if something was slowly sucking all of her drive and energy and motivation to keep on going. ‘Wouldn’t it be much easier to turn around? Or even have a rest?’ it said. She pushed it away, and instead focused on the task at hand. In, and out, preferably without alerting anything nasty to their presence. The market hall wasn’t too far from the entranceway, if she remembered correctly, and if there wasn’t anything there then the crafts district wasn’t too far in either.

  The pale light of the sun fell away as they entered, passing by the shattered stone doors that had tried to hold out the darkness. Adeena drew her sword and channelled her spirit into it, lighting the area up around them in gold, followed swiftly by green from Xavier, blue from Clawdia, and a whitish-light from some kind of baton-like object Heidi had.

  The multicoloured light washed over the massive entrance hall, catching here and there on still, armoured dwarven forms and the broken and shattered skeletons of various creatures from across the planes: she spotted a pit fiend, half a dozen small sprites, their desiccated wings glinting in the dark, and what might have been a Vodyanoy.

  “They stayed and fought?” said Heidi, shining her baton over an armoured form. “Didn’t they know they couldn’t survive?”

  “Most dwarves were deeply traditional,” said Xavier. “And committed to clan and hearth.”

  “‘Retreat’ is the same word as ‘surrender’ in their tongue,” said Adeena. “What they spoke here, at least. Didn’t ever get to that many eastern holds.”

  “Oh, why not?” asked Heidi.

  Adeena tapped her ears. “I look half-elven, and eastern holds were beneath the mountains of the wonderfully xenophobic Hal’varian empire. Back when it was actually an empire.”

  “And as a once-citizen of said xenophobic high elven empire, I can speak with some authority in saying that most of the dwarven holds weren’t that much better,” said Xavier. “The idea of living with others probably didn’t much appeal to them – and they weren’t in the position to dig a massive canal to stop the Wyrd like my people.”

  “But surely they would have realised that it was hopeless?” said Heidi. “When the monsters just kept on coming and coming and coming?”

  “It was probably too late at that point,” said Adeena, turning a dwarven corpse over gently with a boot. It was impossible to tell the gender beneath the armour, but they’d died from something piercing the metal above the heart.

  They continued onward, passing out of the entrance-hall, through another shattered cavern, and into a massive, wide space held up by regularly spaced columns of immense stone, a dozen stories high. Around the edges of the large space there were buildings carved into the rock, and at the far end it opened up even further into a massive natural cavern with flattened outcroppings here and there, connected by bridges and vanishing off into darkness.

  Which they shouldn’t have been able to see, except there were several of the platforms lit up by sickly, faint, flickering white-flamed torches, around which small shapes were moving.

  “Um, I thought the dwarves were all dead?” said Heidi as she pulled her goggles down and her dog-like robot whirred off. “Captain… there are dwarves there, across the bridge. It looks like… a market?”

  Adeena didn’t like this. She didn’t like this at all. The Feywilde had markets, here and there, which a mortal could theoretically, at their peril, attempt to interact with. But the Shadowmeere? She’d never heard of any accounts of such a thing. If they hadn’t needed the Blood Diamond so badly, she’d have turned around then and there.

  “Careful,” she said. “This smells like a trap.”

  They made their way forward, across the cavern, and then the bridge. As they approached Adeena could indeed see that there were hundreds of dwarves moving in what had been the main market square, shuffling between stalls and, seemingly, buying or selling items.

  A few of the dwarves looked up as Adeena and the others entered the market, gazing at them with grey eyes set into dour, joyless grey faces. Faded, these dwarves were Faded – those who remained in the Shadowmeere too long, and had all the colour and emotion and verve for life sucked out of them and left pale reflections of what they had once been.

  Which didn’t make any sense. The Wyrd was, by definition, an ever-shifting and ever-changing phenomenon. The different parts of Ruvera phased in and out of the other planes constantly as rips and tears opened and closed, which meant that for the dwarves to have been here since the Calamity, to have survived since the Calamity, the truly deadly realms of the Aether and the Unseeming must have somehow never taken hold.

  “Excuse me?” said Adeena, speaking in her somewhat rusty Lorchian dialect of Drazi to a shopkeeper who seemed to be selling an utterly eclectic variety of old trinkets and objects. “Are you the original inhabitants of this city?”

  “Fifty hammers,” said the dwarven woman in a dull, lifeless voice, moving her hand very slowly and placing it on a metal comb. She moved it to a sewing kit. “One crown, ten hammers.”

  “Um… all right, the comb thanks,” said Adeena, sheathing her sword and rummaging in her coin purse before placing five ten-talon pieces on the counter. The woman stared at the money for a moment, before sweeping it towards her and reaching for some wrapping paper. “Listen, how long have you lived here?” pressed Adeena. “How many cycles?”

  The dwarven woman slowly wrapped the comb, a slight frown on her face and what might have been a little more brightness in her eyes. “How… long?” she said.

  “Yes, how long,” asked Adeena.

  “So… so long. I don’t know,” she said, finishing wrapping the object and handing it back to Adeena. “Here.”

  “Great, thanks,” said Adeena, pocketing it. “Any idea? Any at all-”

  “I’ll buy that comb,” said the dwarf. “Fifty hammers.”

  “You’ll… sorry?” said Adeena, totally thrown.

  “That comb, I’ll buy it, fifty hammers,” said the dwarven woman.

  “But you just sold it to me,” said Adeena.

  “Got to… keep trading,” said the woman.

  “Why? Why do you need to keep trading?” asked Adeena. “What happens if you stop trading?”

  The woman’s dull, lifeless eyes brightened ever so slightly again, this time into fear. “Can’t say,” she said. “Can’t say… he’ll hear. Buy something or… move on.”

  “But-”

  “Buy something, or move on,” whispered the woman, her body beginning to tremble.

  Adeena backed off, frowning as she continued further into the market. All around them dwarves were moving around, buying and selling things. None of the stalls had any kind of theme, it was all just random mixes of junk.

  “Recognise this design?” she asked Xavier, handing him the comb. “It looks Lorchian to me, but you’re the anthropologist.”

  “Hmm…” he said, peering at it. “Yes, looks like it, certainly. A very good copy, if it isn’t.”

  “How could they have been here this whole time?” said Adeena. “That would mean this place is stuck as Shadowmeere.”

  “Possible,” sniffed Clawdia.

  Adeena turned to her usually useless sorceress. “Sorry?” she said.

  “Possible,” said Clawdia. “Places with strong associations, and a powerful being, they can anchor an area in the Wyrd.”

  “And you know that, how?” said Adeena.

  Clawdia shrugged. “Our home is like that,” she said. “Meowlington. It’s near Crowncourt, has been anchored in Ruvera for a while. From before the Wyrd, actually.”

  “And you… never told us this, because!?” said Adeena.

  “The Captain Adeena Yassin never asked us!” said Clawdia defensively. “The Captain Adeena Yassin never asks us!”

  Adeena resisted the urge to strangle the feline sorceress. “Because normally you aren’t even paying attention to what is going on,” said Adeena, before taking a deep breath. “OK, so this place has been anchored by some kind of powerful being? Why?”

  Clawdia shrugged. “We don’t know,” she said, peering at the metal comb. “Shiny, can we have it?”

  “Fine,” said Adeena, handing it to the useless sorceress, who immediately began to use it to brush the fur on her arm. “OK, well… I don’t really want to meet whatever has anchored this place here, so let’s try and find a Blood Diamond, and then get out of here-”

  “But little sweetlings, we so wish to meet you,” came a deep, saccharine voice, seemingly from all around them.

  The shadows seemed to lengthen and grow, and Adeena drew her sword, making it burn brighter as the darkness distorted and shifted, streaming towards a point ahead of her and resolving into the figure of a man. All around her, the dwarves cringed away, and Clawdia let out a deep hiss as a handsome elven man wrapped in a cloak of black feathers shimmered into focus.

  He had a bald head, eyes of pure darkness, and skin as white as the outside snow.

  “What are you?” said Adeena, levelling her sword at him.

  “Me? Why, I am the owner and proprietor of the Shademarket,” he said. “I have had many names, so many names-”

  “King of Crows,” hissed Clawdia.

  “Ah, that is what the grimalkin call me, yes,” he said, smiling to reveal a mouth full of obsidian-black teeth.

  “You know what this is, Clawdia?” said Adeena, shocked that her sorceress was being useful twice in as many minutes.

  “Wicked fey-lord, the King of Crows was cast out,” she hissed.

  “A fey lord, what’s he doing here?” said Adeena.

  “The King of Crows… lied,” said Clawdia, spitting out the last word as if she was passing a hairball.

  Adeena had no idea how that worked. As far as she was aware, fey creatures couldn’t lie, in the same way that demons couldn’t break contracts. It was a law of nature, a fact of existence, as real as magnetism or gravity or the turn of the cycles.

  The ‘King of Crows’ smiled wider.

  “So, a grimalkin, a cambion, and two mortals – what an odd little party,” he said. Adeena immediately reached to check her glasses were in place. “Oh yes, that doesn’t fool me, little hellspawn. What brings you here?”

  Adeena glanced sideways at Clawdia, but the hissing woman offered no advice, only caterwauling.

  “We are looking for a Blood Diamond,” said Adeena, choosing her words carefully. She had no idea if the rules for dealing with an ex-fey were the same as dealing with a fey, but in the absence of direction, it was probably safer to assume they were. “Do you happen to have one we might purchase?”

  “I might,” he said. “Although I am unsure what you have to offer for such a rare and expensive object.”

  “We have gold,” said Adeena.

  The King of Crows cackled, his voice warping and ringing in a way that made her ears ache. “Gold, I have no use for gold,” he said, leaning forward. “You, hellspawn, you burn in a way I have never felt before. Such fire. I could be convinced to give you the gemstone, for but a taste of you.”

  “No!” hissed Clawdia. “Do not agree, the Captain Adeena Yassin!”

  There were only a few times that Clawdia had ever volunteered advice, three times, if Adeena remembered correctly, and all of them had been through their brief jaunt through the Feywilde, and all had saved her from a rather terrible fate. Some people made the mistake of assuming that grimalkin were stupid. They weren’t, they were highly intelligent. Their priorities, however, were just usually not something most other people understood. But if Clawdia was telling her something directly, then she wouldn’t second guess her. Not in a situation like this.

  Also, getting a ‘taste of her’ sounded exceedingly weird in any context.

  “No, thank-you,” said Adeena. “Something else, perhaps?”

  The ex-fey’s face contorted into something hateful, and for a moment Adeena thought he was going to attack. But then the moment passed and his face resumed a more jovial expression.

  “I suppose there is something you could do for me,” he said, turning his head around, and around, and around, until it was looking directly behind him. “I have a… small irritation.”

  “OK?” said Adeena.

  “A cult of dwarves,” he said.

  “That’s… OK?” said Adeena. “What about them?”

  “They defy me,” he said, turning his head back around, the other. “Worship some foul creature of the Unseeming. Keep me from what is mine.”

  “And you want us to…?”

  “Their leader, ‘Karatrina,’ she styles herself a ‘Prophet,’” he said. “Kill her, and return here, and I will give you what you seek.”

  “Look, Mr… King of Crows,” said Adeena. “I’m not in the habit of randomly murdering women, no matter what they believe.”

  “An odd standard to hear from a hellspawn,” he said. “Your people invented sadism.”

  “I am not ‘my people,’” said Adeena thinly. “Any more than you or Clawdia are somehow representatives of all fey.”

  The King of Crows cackled with laugher. “I suppose you are correct,” he said. “But, my dear hellspawn, whatever your disagreements with me, surely you realise that the creatures of the Unseeming are a threat to both our realms, to Pandemonium and Shadowmeere alike – to say nothing of Ruvera. Those who worship a creature of that realm invite the destruction of us all.”

  Adeena shifted uneasily. That was true: you could bargain with a Fey, you could commiserate with a tormented soul of the Shadowmeere, you could make a contract with a demon of Pandemonium, and you could prostrate yourself before a Godling of Elysium. You could, with extreme effort, even treat with some of the dreaming spirits of the Aether – not that they often took much interest in denizens of other planes.

  But you could not bargain, console, barter, or beg with a being of the Unseeming. Communication was possible, but even the smallest of contact would leave the mind scarred, changed by the malevolent beings of that twisted realm. The realm was fundamentally antagonistic to creatures of the Real. Cults of the Unseeming had never been tolerated anywhere in any land. Even necromancers, those who claimed to manipulate the entropic energies ‘safely’ were widely abhorred.

  The dragons, in particular, had a special enmity for the beings and the magic of the Unseeming. It was said to be the only reason they had tolerated the founding of Althaea off their peninsula’s coast in the first place. The founders of Althaea had been the exiles from the wizarding city of Galdeburgh, driven out over their fervent opposition to the magic of undeath. And perhaps as a result, to this day, Althaea was the only mortal city or state to have anything approximating a treaty of equals with the Imperium.

  “Why do you want her dead?” said Adeena.

  “Be careful, the Captain Adeena Yassin,” hissed Clawdia. “This one lies!”

  “Because this domain is mine,” said the King of Crows, chomping his obsidian teeth. “I know you have no love for me, hellspawn. But surely you do not wish for the Unseeming to have a permanent hold anywhere in Ruvera?”

  Adeena flexed her jaw. No. She didn’t. She was still trying to process the fact that realms were being carved out within the Wyrd permanently. But if that was true… no, no Unseeming foothold could be tolerated.

  “In exchange for the Blood Diamond, and safe passage back out of the city?” said Adeena.

  “Of course,” said the King of Crows.

  “Captain, he lies,” yowled Clawdia, pawing at her sleeve.

  “And do you think we can slay a fey lord?” whispered Adeena back. “No? Me either.”

  Clawdia yowled and pulled at her ears.

  “Alright,” said Adeena. “Where is this ‘Prophet?’”

  “Wonderful,” said the King of Crows, clapping his hands and gesturing for them to follow.

  He wafted forward across the market, the despondent, drained dwarves cringing out of his way.

  “Captain… is there anything we can do for them?” asked Heidi.

  Adeena shook her head. “I don’t think so, no,” she said. “If we had a fleet of airships… maybe. But somehow, I doubt he’d just let us take them, and I’m betting that he’s the being ‘anchoring’ this place. Even if we could kill him, then this place starts to shift again…”

  Heidi slumped.

  They followed the twisted fey to the edge of the market, where a bridge led across a chasm to another flattened mount of rock – this one much larger, what had been the crafting district. In the distance there were flickering lights, although it was hard to see – as if they were behind some kind of… veil.

  “I can go no further,” said the King of Crows, coming to a stop a little way across the bridge. “Here, my domain ends, and Its begins. Best of luck, hellspawn.”

  The fey lord’s outline blurred and twisted, before streaming away into the shadows – seeming to make them stronger and deeper.

  “I don’t like this, Captain,” said Xavier as they edged forward toward where the air seemed to shift and shimmer. “There’s some kind of… threshold.”

  “I feel it too,” said Adeena, raising a hand to the barrier: it was cold, colder, even, than the Shadowmeere. A kind of coldness that sank into the bones and ached. “Nothing for it though, we need that gem.”

  She took a deep breath, and then stepped through into the Unseeming.

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