Low-Fantasy Occultist

The lift doors were sealed shut and covered in a dense lattice of glowing red runes. Ephor Ultimer had superimposed his own Artifice over the original Elpen mechanisms, creating a mighty lock to keep the chaos of the surface from interrupting his work.

Still, it wasn’t as powerful as the blood wards that had surrounded the estate. He could destroy it.

But as Nick went to channel mana through the Shard for a strike, he was stopped.

“Wait," Rosmaria croaked, approaching the runes with narrowed eyes. “Ephor has always been fond of trickwork. Yes, I see he deliberately layered several runes on top of one another. By shattering the protections, you risk triggering the fail-safes built into the shaft, destroying it.”

She drew a silver knife from her belt and dragged it across her cheek. Blood welled up, dark and rich, which she gathered in a gauntleted hand. She then pressed it flat against the doors, uncaring of the burning red runes.

Nick watched in silence. It was a fascinating display of magical authority, and he could see that Rosmaria wasn’t directly contesting Ephor's power.

Instead, her blood resonated with the estate’s foundational architecture, and through that connection, she commanded the stone and metal beneath the Artificer's lock to shift out of alignment.

Red runes flickered and died as their anchor points shifted. Finally, the doors groaned, sliding open to reveal a wide, circular platform.

They stepped inside, and Rosmaria pressed a sequence of hidden plates on the lift's interior wall, sending the platform down into the dark.

The drop was agonizingly slow. As they sank deeper into the earth, the ambient ether grew wilder. Nick rolled his shoulders, feeling a distinct friction in the air, as if two opposing magnetic fields were grinding against each other.

"He is pouring an ocean of mana into the ritual," he observed, impressed despite himself as he studied the currents bleeding up through the floor grates. “The one I believe to be Ephor is providing the raw horsepower for the summoning, while Alexander is creating some kind of vacuum, likely to drag their patron up from the Abyss.”

“So he’s not foolish enough to open a breach," Rosmaria muttered, her breathing shallow as the strain of the potion weighed on her failing body.

“I’m guessing that was his intention," Nick corrected, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the shifting frequencies. "But the underlying structure is wrong. The pull is reflecting off something and echoing in ways I don’t understand.”

It was a brilliant, if horrifying, piece of spellcraft, now that Nick could see its shape. Ephor was casting downward, trying to open a door in the floor of reality. But Alexander had been the one to paint the foundational arrays, and from what he could tell, he’d polarized the runes at the bottom of the sequence. Rather than a simple pull, the array served as a cosmological mirror.

Ephor's immense power struck that mirror and slingshotting upward, bypassing the physical plane and tearing into the heavens.

The temperature in the shaft began to rise. The cold, creeping dread of the Void burned away, replaced by a heat that felt all too familiar. The golden lifeblood of the World that Nick had gathered earlier stirred restlessly in his coils, recognizing the encroaching presence of the divine.

His observations were cut short as the lift slammed to a halt.

They were nowhere near the bottom, yet the shaft doors opened to reveal a corridor lined with lumen-stones.

“They must have severed the descent lines before beginning," Rhea noted after inspecting the lift and peering into the corridor. "He really doesn't want company.”

“Can they be repaired?” Nick asked.

“No,” Rosmaria grunted in displeasure. “Not quickly enough.”

“Then we’ll take the stairs," Gaelen said, stepping off the platform, eyeing every shadowy nook with suspicion.

It was a good thing, for the corridor was a gauntlet. Someone had retrofitted the maintenance levels with traps, and soon, hidden compartments in the walls hissed, venting highly corrosive alchemical gas.

Probably Nestor’s work. He seemed fond of this kind of thing and would probably have gotten a kick out of knowing that even his own workers were always dancing on the edge of an ugly death.

Nick summoned a rotating cylinder of wind around the group, trapping the gas in the air currents and funneling it harmlessly into the ceiling vents, yet that was only the first trap.

As they rounded a corner, they nearly walked into a staging area. A dozen Ultimer guards, clad in combat gear, were reinforcing a barricade of overturned crates. A mage stood behind them, weaving a complex spell to collapse the ceiling.

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Gaelen prepared to charge ahead and give them the cover they needed to punch through, but a sudden commotion behind the barricade halted him.

Two servants in drab gray uniforms, carrying crates of alchemical supplies, abruptly dropped their burdens. One of them, a young woman with a hard expression, shoved a flask into the mage's satchel. She then grabbed her companion, and they threw themselves behind a solid stone pillar.

The flask detonated. Green fire consumed the mage and the three guards nearest him, blowing a hole straight through the barricade.

Not ones to let such a gift go to waste, Nick and Gaelen surged through the smoke.

Nick caught a disoriented guard with a palm strike to the chest, sending a burst of air into the man's lungs that ruptured them instantly. Gaelen fell upon them with murder in his eyes, his blade finding gaps in the remaining guards' armor and plunging deep.