Chapter 176: 176 – Gestalt Kaleid

That self-same thrumming buzz washed over her once more, this time utterly consuming all other sensation within and without, and Zelsys found herself motionless. She sat stone-still, her mind filled by the sight of words in an ancient script and the sound of an equally ancient voice reading them out loud. A deep, wizened voice, so natural it felt like it was this place’s builder personally speaking to her. Even still she could not understand the words, and even still she instinctively knew the meaning behind them.

“Thy gestalt kaleid forges a sky’s worth of lights into a heaven-scorching star.”

“Stand atop the beast-mountain’s bones and tear the fire from the heavens, walk the path of contradiction.”

Between the lines, the words, even between the individual letters, she caught flickerings of machinations beneath the surface. Impurities in the flow of pure cognition, as if the arcane conduits of this place were leaking. She saw flickering images of a great stone city glimpsed from the top of a tower through some long-dead person’s eyes, perhaps one of the Three Kings himself. Spires of black-stone stretched to the sky, a great citadel floated far above just beneath the clouds, and among it all, vast roof and terrace gardens broke up the sea of stone buildings.

Then, it all burned. The rivers ran red with the blood of more than could be counted. The sky rained fire. It was all flattened into dust, scourged from the earth, the remnants buried beneath dearth. A metropolis, erased. 

The images stopped. 

The words returned.

The voice was sad and angry. 

The voice of a dead man, living on as a ghost in a machine. 

Seething for vengeance from beyond the grave.

“Plunder the old world and build from the spoils anew, usher in the new unfolding.”

“Pull thy lessers from their mire and they will gladly oil the chains of your machines with their own blood, stoke the embers of your forges with their own bones.”

There were four thuds in quick succession. The thrumming sensation vanished in an instant and she lurched back into the waking world, finding herself in the dimly-lit chamber with the four rings back in their places as part of the floor. 

“H-how did it go?” the Caster’s voice resounded, unsure and shaky.

Chest heaving and breaths heavy, Zelsys stood to her feet and turned to face him, asking along the way, “How did it look like it went?”

“You uh… You started talking, threw your head back so far I could see your face, and then your eyes rolled into the back of your head,” he recounted with some reluctance while Zelsys made her way out of the chamber. 

He nearly tripped over himself trying to keep up when she didn’t even wait for him and briskly walked back down the hall.

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“Fog started coming out of your tear ducts, and then you woke up,” he finished when he caught up, prompting Zelsys into a momentary smile of equal bitterness and brevity.

Then, they walked in silence. 

Tok. Tok. Tok.

It wasn’t until they had reached the lift and it began to rise again that the Caster asked another question.

“Did… Did you get any answers?” the bugman asked.

Zel gave a nod, “Yeah. Some that I don’t have questions for just yet.”

The glyph on the ceiling came alive, raining Fog down on them before the elevator sped up with no signs of stopping, forcing them upward and out.

---

It had been a scant few minutes before they returned, the two of them rising from the projection glyph before its Fog Gate shut under their feet. 

Strolvath could discern a subtle shift in the slayer’s aura, a shift as subtle as the turn of a blade within the wielder’s hand. Something had certainly changed, but he knew he couldn’t extract what it was even if he tried.

So it was that he simply sat back and rested for a bit longer while the others prepared to finally depart, sipping Vitamax in tiny sips. This time it wasn’t to soothe his ever present aches, but because it helped alleviate the acute pain of that very amplifier that he had Delta jam into his throat. 

Zel made her way to reunite with Zef the moment she regained her bearings, whereas the Caster reunited with the Spearman, speaking in hushed tones. The Caster shook his head, sighed loudly, then seemed to concede on something. That something became clear when he, once again, walked to the projection altar, while the Spearman walked out in front of them and tried to get their attention.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

He thumped his spear, then wordlessly gestured with it towards the projection altar just as the Caster raised his staff again, flipping it upside-down. Its other end split into myriad needle-thin points folded out in a narrow cone, and the Caster cautiously pushed it into the stone. Stone-still he stood as the Spearman led the others onto the platform, and they carefully stood around in anticipation of the Fog Gate’s opening. With a turn to the right a new gate glyph pattern lit up, and the gate opened all at once with a burst of Fog, for just long enough for them to fall through.

They lurched downward, falling through the gate. They struggled for a moment as they fell onto a platform and regained their bearings. From there, it was a short ride down through a dimly-lit shaft atop an awkwardly small platform, during which Zelsys noticed that by some mechanism of the Fog Gate, the Caster had retained his staff and it had returned to its default state. The platform stopped not to a hallway or a chamber, but at a bare wall. 

Before either of the four slayers could question, their locust allies stepped up to a wall and each in turn thumped the ground. It fell away to reveal nothing, and the sound of the cogworks overwhelmed all other sounds. Thumping, clacking, sliding and grinding, it was all that could be heard, and the locusts beckoned them to follow as they stepped into the grey nothing.

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