The platform descended with a sound of grinding metal gears and stone scraping on stone.


    “No element of surprise. Whatever’s there will know we’re coming down,” Quistis said as she paced the rim of the platform, keeping a mental check of the depth. The Sanctum had been dug deep under the mountain, deep enough that no Egia could ever sense it from the surface. Only blind bad luck could otherwise bring anyone close to it.


    Smart. Terrifying, but smart.


    “What exactly is this place?” Vial asked. “Never seen anything like it before.”


    “Vitalis Sanctum,” Rumi replied from besides Barlo’s tall form. She was producing knives from somewhere and fastening them around her belt for ease of access.


    “I got the name. But what is it?”


    Quistis answered ahead of Rumi, drawing on memories from her earlier days of training, “Place of power. Channellers sometimes build these as fortresses where they can work unimpeded. Vitalis ones aren’t even the weirdest of the lot.”


    “Throne eternal.” Vial whistled. “I’d rather I went back to the demons at the Twins.”


    “Wait ‘till ye see a Crepuscular’s Sanctum,” Barlo chuckled. “First one’ll strip sleep from ye for a whole season. If yer lucky.”


    The air stank at the bottom of the shaft. Its humid, cadaverous stench clung to them as they walked out into the waiting dark.


    Seething, writhing masses and lumps of fleshy protuberances covered the tunnel walls. They were everywhere, from floor to ceiling, and moved and extended feelers towards them as they passed by. Their steps squelched, the morass floor sucking them down, trying to climb up their legs. The smell grew worse as they followed the tunnel. Small eyeball-like lamps on the walls gave off a twitching, blinking white light that followed their progress. Quistis brought her sprite close as one tendril grew teeth and snapped after it. Human faces sometimes formed out of the walls, moving soundless lips at them, gaping mouths that turned inside out when looked upon.


    Barlo spat.


    “It reeks of fear,” he grumbled as he stomped on an eyeball growing on a flesh stalk.


    Sounds exuded from the walls in a continuous echo of almost human sighs, whispers in unknown tongues, groans, and humming. The cacophony only got louder as the passage widened into a circular chamber that, itself, split apart in various directions. Eye lamps blinked and the light of the room focused on the group as they entered. There was a momentary pause in the noise, but it resumed as if it had judged them of no importance.


    “Place looks very alive to me, Rumi,” Quistis said. Her sprite moved in circles around them to show the flesh of the walls writhing and squirming.


    “It’s dead. It just hasn’t finished dying yet.”


    Putrefied corpses littered the room. One burst with a wheeze of escaping gas. Whatever it had been was impossible to determine.


    Barlo grumbled and hefted his mace.


    “Yer a strong lad, Vial, but this ain’t yer work,” he said as he turned in place to take in the devastation. The piles of rotting corpses rose as tall as he was in places.


    “Nah. My pile’s over there.” He showed some fresh bodies cooling among the rest.


    “Ye, feared as much. Captain, yer thoughts?”


    The room whimpered as the sprite got closer to the walls. Craters in the flesh growth showed signs of battle. Fire had been applied with crushing fury.


    “Big fight went on in here,” Quistis stated the absolute obvious. Her lunch wanted to come up for a look around.


    A wailing creature ripped itself out of a wall and charged at them. Barlo reacted before anyone else, stepped in its path and brought down the mace, pulping it on the spot.


    “See, Vial? If it’s mulch, it stops moving.”


    More howls followed as the tunnels spat out more creatures. Walking, rotting corpses rushed them on decomposing limbs, waving weapons of splintered, sharpened bone.


    The vanadal warrior whistled as he drew his daggers.


    Quistis erected barriers on their flanks, enforced them and made a bottleneck that led into the two warriors upfront. Rumi pressed her back to hers just as Barlo waded into the throng.


    He swung his weapon in a wide arc, mowing down anything that got within reach. They fell to him in numbers. Vial guarded his back, his borrowed sword cleaving clean through anything that got close enough.


    Quistis’s barriers cracked under the pressure of bodies. Barlo whistled again, and she added more invisible walls to his flank.


    “Push,” he calmly called over his shoulder.


    Vial obeyed and moved out of his shadow of slaughter. They advanced, keeping a weapon’s length gap between them, and broke the assault.


    Quistis studied one creature mindlessly throwing itself at her barrier.


    It was impossible to determine what its base species could have been. Someone had grafted parts where they didn’t belong, had amputated limbs, and reduced them to spears of bone. The head… she couldn’t look at the head. Its eyes were lidless, terrified, still very much alive. Some intelligence still shone there, but it had clearly been driven into insanity by whatever had been done to the poor thing.


    Its suffering ceased when Barlo’s mace crushed it down into a pile of mashed organs and bone fragments. He dragged another of the chimeras off his back and slammed it into the barrier by a foot. The leg broke off at the knee and he beat the wailing creature to death with the stump.


    The assault ebbed, the creatures running cowed into the safety of whatever nest had spawned them. The warriors let them run. In due time, they would purge the Sanctum clean of all atrocities.


    Chimeras, along with grave horrors, skirted the edge of necromancy. Empress Catharina had passed edict, two centuries back, for their destruction. Any Vitalis mage found to be making such creatures was to be executed on the spot. By the state of the place, Quistis imagined someone had already enacted justice.


    “Got a nasty bite here,” Barlo called out and showed one of his naked lower arms.


    Quistis rushed to his side and inspected the wound. The creature had bitten straight down to the bone. Some of its teeth were still lodged in the muscles, along with an entire jaw that kept gnawing on the arm. Barlo pulled it off and crushed it in his large hand.


    She opened a flask and washed the wound, picking out teeth fashioned like fishhooks from torn muscles. Blood flowed purple for a moment then lightened in colour to the soft pink of the vanadal constitution.


    Quistis pressed her hand to the clean wound.


    “I require this one to be mended,” she chanted. When she took her hand away only soft scar tissue remained.


    “I don’t think we’re done with our hosts,” she said as she replaced the flask in her bag.


    “Nah, but we smote fear in them. Vial, ye still in one piece?”


    “Safe and hale, brother. I need to get me one of these when we get back,” the other warrior said as he shook gore off his borrowed blade. There was a ring of ruined corpses around him, parts of them trying to crawl away. He slammed his armoured foot down on some.


    The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Quistis urged them forward into one of the open tunnel mouths. Rumi was quiet at her back.


    “Seeing anything?”


    “Shattered bits of weave,” the Egia replied. “There is that pattern I saw all the way up top and, in the tunnel, but it’s faint now.”


    “Keep at it. At least this answers some questions for us. Something like this doesn’t just grow overnight.”


    Oh, Goddess…


    A nightmare room welcomed them. Quistis knew it for what it was the moment she stepped inside, and her stomach lurched into her throat at the very notion of its existence.


    A single orb, somewhere high above, still twitched and lit up the ruins. Bodies were embedded in the wall, all of them charred black.


    Barlo got closer to one and grunted in disgust.


    “Used to be female if I’m any judge,” he said, voice low. He swung his torch around. “All of them. No limbs. Held in cradles. There are tubes going inside the corpses.” He spat.


    “I can’t count them all,” Vial put in as he moved around with Quistis’s sprite. “There’s so many.” He stopped by one body. Its abdomen was distended and had burst. A mound of flesh had leaked out and putrefied on the floor. All unfortunates in there had been cooked alive.


    “This used to be a breeding room,” Quistis said, just so the words would be out of her. “Chimera stocks were being bred here. Just buying warm bodies wasn’t enough.”


    The Academy had stamped out the more abject Vitalis practitioners. She had read of the purge years back. It seemed they had missed one.


    “Someone used a devourer in here,” Rumi said. “Its weave lingers.”


    “Can you say which one?”


    “I think this was Titan’s Punishment,” she said, quiet. “Yes, that’s the one. Not a pattern I recognise on the weave.”


    “So there was a powerful Metal Mind down here, picking a fight with whichever Vitalis nursed this atrocity. We should thank them if we find them.”


    Quistis fought back a shiver of revulsion as her sprite went up, showing row upon row of burnt cadavers. The cavern had been packed tight; every nook occupied by at least one cradle. There were easily a couple hundreds.


    “Or have them executed for murder.”


    “Mercy killing,” Barlo mused. “The Punishment woulda killed them all in a blink. Good control too. Didn’t punch off the mountain’s top.”


    Quistis wanted to argue for the sake of her sanity but decided against it. Would they have done different? Probably not. Only so much could be done for victims of a Vitalis, and death was kinder than living.


    Some of the other rooms showed similar devastation.


    There was a destroyed laboratory, equipment reduced to melted lumps of glass.


    Holding cages had been opened, their contents splattered into gore.


    An operation room, with bone tables and instruments, lay intact, gruesome work rotted through, unrecognisable.


    They lost count of the corpses they found. The Sanctum had thrown a wall of claws and teeth at its invaders and had been beaten back. The creatures that assaulted Vial and Rumi were nothing more than the surviving dregs, doomed to slow decay.


    Then they found the stairs. A perfectly even set ran down into a deeper, blacker darkness.


    “There,” Rumi said. “It all leads down there.”


    “Can’t be worse than the rest,” Barlo grumbled as he went down into the inky dark. He barely fit through the narrow tunnel.


    The stairs led deeper down under the mountain. Air, thick with the stench of putrefaction, seemed to congeal around them, as dead as anything else in there. For the first time in hours, Quistis was happy to have the mask on, both for the protection it offered and for hiding her face. Blood ran down her chin from where she had bitten through her lip.


    Decades of horror within a stone throw of Valen. What are we even doing if we’ve allowed this to happen at all?


    She ran into Vial’s back as the stairs ended and they emerged into a cavernous room.


    A throne of bones and viscera dominated its centre or had at some point. Now it lay toppled over and half-burned.


    “They fought in here,” Rumi said, looking slightly sick. “There were two of them. They were spectacularly powerful. At least to match up with Adjunct Leea.”


    She walked around, eyes unfocused as she read only what she could see in the pitch. Her steel-toed boots clanked on solid stone.


    “Another devourer was used. Here.” She tapped the naked stone with a heel.


    Quistis’s sprite showed a triangular patch of floor with no growth on it, clean and smooth.


    “Titan’s Punishment again?”


    Rumi shook her head.


    “No, this was a different one. Much viler.” She concentrated for a moment and closed her eyes. “Life eater. Wild.” Her brow furrowed and she looked pained in the light. “Poisonous. No!” Her eyes snapped open, and she reeled back.


    Barlo was at her side in a moment, mace hefted, looking for whatever had frightened her. Vial grabbed her shoulder to steady her.


    “Captain, this is bad,” Rumi said, shaking with every word. She shook her hands as if to get filth off them. “We need to go back to Valen and get the Commander. We’re in trouble.”


    “Talk to me first, Rumi,” Quistis said as she headed to her side. “What do you see?”


    “This was Disintegration.” She pointed at the bare rock. “And the rest was fire. There’s only one channeller that wielded that monstrosity. She’s dead.”


    Oh no.


    “And does this channeller that makes ye piss yer pants have a name?” Barlo grumbled.


    Rumi scowled up at him.


    “It’s Cinder, you blockhead.” She spat out the name. “Bloody thrice-damned Cinder was in here, where you stand right now.” Shaking off Vial, she moved some steps forward. “A portal was used right here, and someone walked through. If so, Cinder can be in Valen right now, right under our noses.”


    Barlo’s free hands balled into fists and his jaw tightened, all levity gone.


    “Are ye sure? An awful lot of assumption on that,” he said, voice like rumbling thunder.


    “It doesn’t matter if she’s sure,” Quistis replied. “If there’s two channellers that we don’t have tabs on, who can use devourers of that magnitude, then we need to consider a worst-case scenario.” She had already opened up a portal straight to Valen’s Illum Hearth. This needed acting upon.


    “There’s a corpse here,” Vial called from the opposite end of the room, where the cone of devastation hit the wall.


    “There’s corpses everywhere,” Barlo shot back.


    “Aye, but this one moves.”


    Quistis cursed and headed over. The day held only surprises and none of them had been pleasant so far.


    A woman was entombed in the wall, a complicated lattice of tubes pocketing her flesh and holding her upright. The spell hadn’t hit her fully, but it had been enough to char half of her. The other half had bloated with death. But Vial held at sword point something different.


    On the floor, cowering before the corpse, was a figure. It approximated a woman. She was skeletal thin, wilted and dishevelled. Thin wisps of white hair clung to her scalp and bones poked out against her skin. She hid her face and tried to shy away from the light, hissing when Vial took a step closer. His sword’s killing point was aimed straight at the thing’s throat.


    “Don’t touch that,” Rumi called from behind. “That’s a Flesh Doll. Survived her maker and is now dying along with the Sanctum. She’s bleeding illum.”


    Quistis looked at the creature and then at the corpse, “I guess this was our Vitalis”. She put a hand on the remains, to the Flesh Doll’s hissed horror. The skin was cold and wax soft, yielding to her touch. They wouldn’t get anything from that.


    But the doll…


    “Vial, be ready to take that with us.”


    It growled at her, showing rotted needle-like teeth. It was too weakened to do much more than growl and shrink back against the wall at the feet of its maker.


    “I require this be preserved,” Quistis chanted. A shimmering, translucent barrier encased the Flesh Doll and held it in place. Even so wasted, it struggled against the bond, enough that it proved troublesome.


    “I can hold it long enough that we get to Valen. Pick it up and be ready to move,” she ordered. “Barlo, can you make your way back up to the cave on your own?”


    “Give me two of yer draughts and I’ll be fine,” he replied. He looked like he would enjoy cracking some more chimera skulls.


    She threw him the flasks.


    “Get up there and get that chest of papers. You can handle yourself out of the tunnels after that. Drop it off at Lucian’s. Tell him that if I don’t see sorties go up for a thousand griffons each, hunting any leads on whoever the rats dealt with, I will have him flogged and salted.”


    “Aye, ma’am.”


    “Rumi, you head straight for the Gate. I’m giving you special permission for its use. Go to Aztroa Magnor and find Falor. He’s visiting the Empress. Find him and tell him Tallah Amni is active again, and likely in Valen. Do not let anyone belay you.”


    Rumi saluted with her right fist to her left shoulder.


    “Yes, ma’am.”


    She rushed through the portal without waiting for further instructions.


    Quistis waited until Vial had the struggling creature on his shoulder and passed through the portal. She had another look around the room, raised her mask to spit blood and bile on the memory of that Sanctum of horrors, and went through.