Chapter Three Hundred And Fifty Three - 353Darkness parted, and Felix fell much further than he expected. He hit the ground with a muted grunt, unhurt but surprised. Orienting himself, he looked behind him only to find his team huddled together in a dark chamber...but no Shadowgate.
Look up, Pit sent to him. The tenku was pawing at a nearby wall, green and black with strange plants.
Puzzled, Felix saw the glimmering face of a Shadowgate mounted to the ceiling of all places. More important than its stupid placement though, it flashed and sparked, clearly not in the best repair. The inky darkness at its center bubbled and popped like boiling tar or burning smoke. And from its depths, Felix could still feel a discordant cry of excruciating Need and Fury.
The Whalemaw was drawing closer.
"We need to shut that gate off!" he shouted.
Zara stood rapidly, looking from him to the gate. "Did you see it?"
"No, but I heard it. Can hear it, still," Felix said with a dry swallow. "It's getting closer. Karys? Karys can you hear me?"
The hooked blade at his waist was inert for an upsetting moment before it flickered with green-gold life Mana. "I do. Wonderful! I was."
"Karys how do we shut down the gate?" Felix interrupted.
"Shut it down? But then you would have to reinstate the connection, wasting more"
"We need to shut it down! Your side too! Now!" Felix felt that Need tear at him from above, an almost physical force.
"II, of course, my Lord! Find the joining glyph, reminiscent of a loosened knot."
"Found it!" Atar said, clearly picking up on the tension. He pointed at something directly above himself, at least fifty feet away. His hands charged with orange Mana regardless. "What do I do? Split it?"
"What? No! That'll misalignno! Felixmy Lord!pull out the power from the gate. Devour it!"
Felix didn't question his friend, but reached out his Intent and latched onto where Atar pointed. A glyph, shimmering with a deep blue light, woven around itself like Celtic knotwork. He seized it with his Will.
Chthonic Tribute!
The joining glyph spat fire, enough that Atar howled and leaped aside, and Felix tore it free, into his channels.
The Shadowgate flickered once, and cut out. The dark of the Void turned instantly into mere shadows, while the roar of furious Need vanished like a popping bubble.
"Karys! Did you shut down the gate on your side as well?" Felix asked his sword. There was a faint buzzing and an upsettingly long pause...before it blazed to life once more. Ribbons of green-gold Mana spun about the blade's hilt.
"It is done, my Lord."
Felix trembled, feeling muscles unclench that he'd never known he'd had. He eased himself down, against the wet, mossy stone of...wherever they had landed.
"Avet's black teeth, what was that?" Alister asked.
"Your Whalemaw," Zara said. "It sensed you, after the array slipped through."
"Yeah."
"That was not a great deal of time," Vess pointed out. She leaned on her partisan and peered upward at the ceiling-mounted Shadowgate. "How did it sense you and reach you in mere fractions of a glass?"
"Time does not flow correctly in the Void," Zara said. "It is...an unmoored Realm."
"Karys," Felix said to his blade. "How long since we left?"
"It has barely been a glass," he said.
Murmurs swept through the group, and Felix did a quick head count. Faces and names flashed through his Mind, and all of them accounted forthat was a relief. No one had been left behind by accident, and the voidbeasts had been denied entirely.
With that worry off his mind, Felix focused on the tilted room around them. As always, Mana streamed off of every surface, coiling to physical structures like a wireframe of shimmering, colored light. It was confusing and chaotic, but his long practice had made it far easier to usethat, and his exceedingly high Perception.
The room was roughly a hundred feet long and half that across, though it was not boxy by any means. Alcoves and columns, most broken, put divots in the chamber's facade while the floor was a spacious lattice of cut stone, similar to many Nymean architectural features. Beneath it's porous surface, Felix could see more water, brackish but not terribly deep. The water deepened the further out one travelled, until it dropped off into a dark pool at the far end of the chamber. Green and black plantsmoss mostlycovered the walls and ceiling, and the smell of ages old must and mold filled Felix's nose.
Exploration is level 62!
"I see a door," Ari rumbled, his head halfway to the ceiling. He pointed a heavily muscled arm, blue as ice. "There."
Felix could see it too. It was a heavy thing, also made of stone and...unless he missed his guess, heavily warded.
"Anyone else think this place is...odd?" Evie said. "Why's it tilted?"
"I'm more concerned about this...leaking," Atar said, pointing out a few intermittent streams the came from above.
"True. I thought this was supposed to be the desert," Evie said, wrinkling her nose. "Why's it so wet? And smelly."
"The Ghreldan Hills are filled with several thousand lakes," Zara explained. She sniffed. "This Temple was clearly built atop one."
"It ain't atop one now," Harn pointed out.
"No, it is not. And that would account for why no one knew a Temple was here," Zara said. "It must have sank."
"Oh burning ashes," Atar moaned. More whispers rippled through the Legion, and even the Dawnguard traded guarded glances.
"We're fully underwater?" Felix asked. He pushed his Perception outward, but much as the Waterfall Temple had, the stone seemed to actively block his senses. He couldn't even detect anything beyond the warded door.
"Unclear," Zara said. Wavering forms of aquamarine light manifested above her palms and elbows, casting a cool light over the stone lattice. "I can feel my attuned element strongly, but it is being muffled by layer after layer of enchantment. Were it not for the architecture, that alone would confirm that this is another Nymean Temple."
Felix looked up at the Shadowgate on the ceiling, trying to parse details. Much of it was overgrown with the same black and green moss around the chamber, but his Perception wasn't blocked here. It was designed like a set of sweeping mountains, several rows of what he called the Teeth interspersed with malachite forests and thick rivers of sapphire. Along one side, he could even clearly make out a large waterfall. Would all the gates leading back to my Stronghold feature the same design? He was fairly certain it would. The Nym were definitely all about their aesthetics.
His eyes caught on a feature of the gate, mostly hidden by the fronds of moss that grew from it.
"This Temple is more than just tilted," Felix said, pointing up again at the inert Shadowgate. "Unless it's common to put steps on something in the ceiling."
"Oh," Vess said.
"This whole place is just about flipped," Atar said through a heavy breath. Sweat was beading on his brow. "We're underwater and in a fallen, crumbling ruin. Oh, Highest."
Alister rubbed the mage's back comfortingly, but looked to the others with urgency. "We need to leave here. There's no telling how safe this all is."
"I agree with that," Harn said from across the room. Half-submerged, near where the water met the lattice-floor there was a statue of a woman with a four-pronged star in her upraised hand. Harn knelt down and pressed his fingertips to the statue's wrist and grunted. A trickle of unformed Mana puffed into the star, igniting it with a bright sodium yellow light that quickly raced across the stone-lattice floor, tracing the outline of stars and leaves and leaping, stylized creatures in blazing radiance. Stars of solid stone across the structure, across all the walls, lit up with Mana, forming a constellation of light that all but banished the shadows in the flooded room.