Chapter 5: Chapter 6: The Ashenvein Gates

The Ashenvein Gates are the thresholds of Machrae Diir--oh, no, little one, not portals.

A portal is a neat thing. Light it up and pass through. Banish it with a word or a touch.

Sometimes the Gates are open. Sometimes they are closed. But they are always waiting to be found. You will know them when you find them. Glistening, blacker than the blackest obsidian, every face ever-boiling and fractured by eternal cobalt fire.

Atop each apex, the same admonition:

Abandon All.

For Machrae Diir is the realm of its Lady. All that dwells within, dwells because she delights in it. A realm of ecstasies and perils, dreams and nightmares, a thousand maelstroms of potential woven to the whims of the outer devil who weaves them.

You will find gentle glades. You will find mournful winds on planes of cinder in the shadow of jagged infernal peaks. You will find Zul, bladework city of the Ashen Trance: a landscape of silvery flanges and blue wastes scoured by solar winds from binary stars: amber, azure.

The Lady wrought Machrae Diir. You are welcome to walk, or soar, or phase wherever you wish within. She will love you for letting her find her home again, the echoes of her past in the present of your journey.

But she will not dull its horrors for you. It was not made for you.

"Abandon All."

This is her promise, her warning, and her atonement. This is her brink.

The kshiinurzhalg, unbridled and joyful and ruthless and eternal.
Revelations of love.
Revelations of home.
Revelations of the end.
Will you cross over, and see what she reveals in you?

 Thresholds and passages and inscriptions poised on high like the title of a book waiting for its opening.
But you can always choose not to.

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Terrors. Lightning. Riven planes.
But you can always walk the other way.
Perhaps it's true for the Lady. She knows so many ways to know.
Oh, yes, you'll know too. But will you know that you do? Sometimes the Gates are spread wide. Sifted in the crevices beneath the peeling flecks on an old doorway.

Hidden under the arches of an old tree's root. Wrapped in the molecules on a cold wind in a snowy forest. Needling. The greater weight deep in dreams. Shine on the floor after everyone else has left the party. The murmur of night under city streetlights.
Enter these moments. Feel the world falling away. Abandon all--you see?

She can say it's fair.

You knew. You just didn't know it yet.

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