Chapter 177: 177 – Cogworks

The group found themselves treading a precarious staircase that spiraled down, each of them occasionally gazing out into the nothingness that surrounded them. There was no light down here, everything was consumed by an ever-present grey Fog that made it feel as though this place truly was an emptiness outside normal existence. And yet, every once in a while they could catch brief glimpses of distant structures so magnitudinous and empyrean that their minds struggled to comprehend them.

Down and down through the grey, down a staircase that felt both narrow, yet impossible to fall off of. No wind, no sky above, no ground below, it stripped even this precarious path of any felt danger, even if a single wrong step would likely mean certain doom.

Such danger was replaced by something far more tangible, for soon enough the staircase began to crumble underfoot. At first, a stair fell out behind them. Then, a crack appeared under Strol’s foot. Moments later, they found the staircase crumbling to pieces just behind them, ushering them downward with greater urgency than any of them was comfortable with.

Slowly though, a septagonal platform ringed by seven archways faded into sight, connected to the stairs by a short walkway. Down and down they went towards the walkway, always just barely ahead of the staircase’s decay.

One by one, they reached the walkway and crossed it to the platform, it too crumbling underfoot - at first cracking, then shaking, then falling to pieces. Being the last in line, Strolvath had to take a leap of faith over the edge to make it.

Once again did the two locusts thump their weapons against the ground, and the platform sunk into the nothingness below. Though slow at first, their descent quickly sped up well past the velocity of a freefall, and yet there was no wind rushing past them and no struggle to keep their feet planted. The only sensation that clued them into just how quickly they were moving was the pressure of g-forces within their own bodies.

And all about them, the density of the obscuring haze grew lesser, unshrouding the workings of the dungeon. No, it was more like the cogworks were spontaneously forming out of the grey, simply appearing from its depths. On their way down they witnessed veritable mountains of mechanisms, slabs of black-stone being shifted by gigantic platforms.

To those of them who could see just beneath the surface-veil of things - Strolvath and Zefaris, that is - it was clear that this wasn’t the default state of the dungeon’s internal workings. All this machinery, all this nonsensical clockwork that had would be impossible to maintain, it had an ephemeral quality that reminded them of particularly convincing theatrical projections. Particularly Strolvath, who had seen such technology being tested in the capital - projections so convincing they fooled ninety men out of a hundred, and of the ten that were not fooled, eight had a Homunculus Eye while the other two had undergone anti-illusionism “Evil Eye” training.

He looked upon the great god-machine that surrounded them, and knew this physical manifestation to be only partly real. A representation that the dungeon had no choice but to conjure for the sake of the observers, that the truth of it wouldn’t drive them mad.

“We must minimize how long we spend here,” the Caster broke the all-encompassing background noise. “Our presence and observation forces the dungeon’s mechanisms to manifest into realspace. They would have no issue withstanding such strain normally, but with things as they are now there is no telling how long they can last until they start sinking.”

A few moments later, the platform came to a sudden stop. 

Matte-black ground stretched out all around them, shrouded by that dismal greyness with perhaps twenty or thirty meters of visibility in any direction. A thump of the Caster’s staff sent a thin line of cyan light snaking across the ground, and he led them in pursuit of it.

They walked, and walked, and walked, following the little glowing line all along.

Eventually, they came upon a tiny black-stone hut standing freely in the middle of the nothingness, its glyphic door painted over with a bright-red hieroglyphic symbol.

The two locusts stared up at it, the Spearmen murmuring a quiet, “Oh no.”

The Caster’s reaction was far less reserved, as he raised his staff and started thumping it against the door whilst screaming a diatribe in hectic, half-slurred Pateirian. Only when the Spearman reached out for him did he snap out of it, quickly quieting down and exchanging a few more words with his counterpart, still in Pateirian. He then looked back to the four slayers and sighed, “We uh… We might be stuck. I can try something to open a path forward, but it will likely just lead us into a deathtrap. If there are any fast preparations you wish to make, make them now.”

“Uh-huh…” grumbled Strolvath as he sat down and pulled up his right pants leg, exposing the wood-encased artificial leg beneath. Before anyone could ask what he was doing, he had already made the casing click open with a few awkwardly-positioned presses at various points on the wood, revealing the fully metallic prosthetic underneath, though its substantial internal volume also contained a much smaller wooden puzzlebox. He removed the aforementioned puzzle box, opened it with a few more strange holds and motions of his fingers, and from the box quickly removed a rusty-brown pill.

In seconds, the box was back inside his leg, the casing was back on, and he had stood back up, already reaching into his backpack for a half-empty seal-bottle, which he had with him despite the fact he should’ve probably run out of elixir by now. Zel wagered he had carried more than they had found on the way to the dungeon, or maybe the Inquisitor had given him some of hers. He then dropped the pill into the bottle and swirled it about for a good ten seconds, murmuring prayers in Old Ikesian under his breath

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