Silenos landed just a few yards from Ensharia, seemingly having fallen from the sky itself. The ground beside her was springy, bouncy. It shook as he impacted it, waves of force actually running through its substance and rebounding her up a few feet into the air.

  She’d forgotten how big he was, in that monstrous form of his. This one was changed somewhat. Armour plating rearranged here or there, limbs tweaked in shape and weaponry different. She recognised him nonetheless.

  “You…” Ensharia backed away from him more out of reflex at anything, feeling sick just to be near him. Shaiagrazni’s eyes snapped onto her lightning-quick, urgency burning bright enough to be easily recognised despite his monstrous visage.

  “Do not back any farther away.” Shaiagrazni hissed. “It is dangerous enough that you spent entire milliseconds here without me, and fortunate that I had the prescience to select an area of the Shallow Depths with such disparate temporal speed to your world.”

  Ensharia understood perhaps one word in two from that linguistic volley, but she’d learned that Shaiagrazni didn’t speak so hastily or desperately over nothing. She halted, despite herself, looking around.

  “Where…Where did you take us?”

  The vampire, Hexeri, moved in to just behind her, clearly not wanting to chance proximity with Shaiagrazni. His body slowly shrunk down as he spoke, abandoning his “war-form” for reasons beyond Ensharia.

  “The Shallow Depths.”

  Ensharia frowned. “That’s oxymoronic.”

  “And you are just moronic.” He replied. “Be silent. The world you have seen is not all there is, and that would remain the case even if you had visited each one able to support life. There is more to reality than realms hospitable to our fragile existences.”

  There it was. Ensharia had missed a few things about her time with the caster- he had, in some ways, been uncommonly good to her. Not caring about her sex, valuing her for ability more than anything. But that abrasive, sneering contempt was never more than a word away. She tried her best to untangle the man’s invaluable knowledge from his valueless superiority complex and decode what she was being told.

  “So we’re somewhere…Magical? Non-physical? But…Hang on, what do you mean support life? This place is supporting our lives.”

  “Speak for yourself.” The vampire cut in. “I don’t need supporting.”

  “Yes.” Shaiagrazni cut in, impatiently. “You do. You do not eat, drink, breathe, but were it not for my magic enveloping us all and stabilising the area around us with causality and logic, your very matter would evaporate and break. The substance of your body still exists around the core tenets of baryonic matter. Without them, you would have no body.”

  Ensharia didn’t think a vampire could actually pale, but this one looked like it might.

  “Why couldn’t you leave me be…” Came a groaning voice. All eyes moved to the source, a…

  Oh fuck, a severed head dangling from Silenos’ side. He glanced down at it, sighing. The thing was repulsive- monstrous, even. Larger than normal, misshapen, looking almost as if someone had decided to beat a normal cranium into pieces and stopped one quarter of the way in.

  “Be silent.” Shaiagrazni told the head, looking at it with genuine annoyance. “That goes for the rest of you as well, I am thinking.” His face twisted with concentration, the very same kind Ensharia had seen infect his features when he was agonising over one creation or another. The weaponry she’d heard he unveiled since her departure was impossible to assess from stories alone. Some claimed he was an upstart hedge-wizard, others that he had a personal cannon able to disembowel mountains. The former Ensharia knew for a fact was false, the latter…

  The latter she found herself hoping was. The days of Silenos Shaiagrazni being an ally of good had died with her friends, and now the regret at ever having let him trick her was welling up anew.

  Something rushed overhead, dragging Ensharia’s gaze upwards. Her legs went weak at the sight.

  “Dear god…”

  “Yes,” Shaiagrazni sighed, “Yes, it’s all very terrifying and beyond your comprehension- as I said, be quiet. You don’t need to distract me while processing your idiot existential crisis.”

  Ensharia was quiet, but it had nothing to do with his angry insistence. She remained as silent as the mouse catching sight of a gliding hawk, trembling, staring, and wishing with everything she had that it would not take note of her as she had of it.

  This time, she was fortunate.

  ***

  The paladin looked like she may lose consciousness at any moment. Silenos considered the prospect, and found himself hoping she would. His thoughts were scattered enough already, cracking at the edges. He felt slivers of molten doubt creep into him. Cognition poisoned, decaying. The foundation of one hundred years’ moral conviction turning soft and fragile beneath him. What was wrong with him? What had he been thinking?

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  He had not been thinking, evidently. He had been feeling. And now he had felt himself into doing the unforgivable. Even Adonis had not committed so great a wrong as this. He, at least, had betrayed only a single Named of House Shaiagrazni, not the name in its entirety.

  He at least had had the excuse of being a mere apprentice, not a mature master of the House.

  “Please, kill me.”

  Silenos felt his fury bubbling up as the hybrid interrupted his thoughts yet again.

  “I will not, but I can hurt you very, very badly if you continue to inconvenience me.”

  Adonis had turned on him instantly, though there may still have been a chance for him to repeat his ritual. Why had that been? The answer was obvious, he had seen a traitor to House Shaiagrazni and moved to dispose of them without hesitation. As he should have done- as each and every one of his fellow Named was taught from the beginning of their induction to do. Traitors were not suffered within the Household of Casters.

  “Kill me.” The head continued, “And I can help you get back to where you came from.”

  Silenos paused, then reached down to raise the severed hybrid up and stare into its face. Not its eyes- never those- but the tip of its nose. As close as he could come without risking the gaze of a being so infused with the touch of an Entity.

  “Explain how.” He demanded, and found his fury triple as the hybrid grinned.

  “No, caster, no, not that easy. Your word first that you’ll kill me once it’s done.”

  Of course he wouldn’t, Silenos had far too many uses for such a creature to simply destroy it. Even putting aside the fact that he wasn’t sure he could kill it permanently, he would sooner remove one of his own limbs than dispose of such a resource.

  But then, there was nothing to lose here from deception.

  “I promise.” He replied, and saw the hybrid scrutinising his features for a moment. Silenos carefully paralyzed his facial muscles as it did. When it seemed satisfied, he continued. “Assuming you can in fact help me escape this place.”

  “I can!” The hybrid spat. “I surely can.”

  “What is that?” Another voice cut in, Ensharia’s. It seemed that everybody would be interrupting Silenos’ thoughts today.

  “The hybrid offspring of a baryonic lifeform and an Entity, I do not care what variety of either. It bears a degree of connection leading from one level of reality to the other- partly existing in both, never entirely in just one. Its very existence makes travel between these levels easier for that reason. Think of it as a conductor in…Ah. Think of it as…Think of it as a wedge leaving a door partly opened.”

  She was still entirely lost, he thought. So it was fortunate that Silenos did not care in the slightest.

  Unfortunately, she was not finished with her questions.

  “So we can get back to the real world?”

  “This world is real.” Silenos snapped. “But, yes. From here we can return to your world, theoretically.” Though he had to admit, he was not entirely certain how long it would have taken until this very moment. There were an endless number of Schisms within the Shallow Depths, and more here now that they were at a higher level than he and Adonis had ventured into. But it was impossible to vet them for any degree of control. Silenos could not actively seek out ones leading back to the New World as he was.

  When he had fled from Adonis, his plan had been to retreat into another world altogether and one day perfect his own Esoterica enough to make an alternate path to House Shaiagrazni. An investment of centuries, perhaps a millennium, on his part. Why?

  So that Arion Falls would live.

  His anger threatened to bubble up all over again. Why? What was wrong with him? What pathogen had infested his cognition deeply enough to induce this?

  “Thank you.”

  Silenos turned to the words, finding the vampire, Hexeri, was eying him, face a mix of wariness and…Gratitude.

  “You didn’t have to get us out of there.” She noted. “It almost got you killed to try, but you did. You could’ve just grabbed the head and made your own retreat, instead you helped us escape too. Thank you for that.”

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”

  Silenos’ scream took even himself by surprise, and it certainly shocked the two women, who now backed away from him staring with wide-eyes and readied fists. He kicked at the ground, tearing great clots of it free and sending them hurtling into the air, entire body trembling, fists balled and thrashing towards the sky. His discharge of fury lasted no more than a few moments, but drained him as if it had been hours.

  Why had he done that? Screamed like some…Some…Animal. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with him?

  Silenos saw the confusion in his new travel-aids’ faces, and found himself without the chance to either address or ignore it. A shriek washed over them all, far away, rattling the air and growing closer by the moment. They turned in unison to its source.

  A shape, a thousand shapes. All twisting and writhing around each other. The thing had fifty heads, seventeen limbs, skin of bronze and weeping, pus-frothed sores where metal connected to stony flesh below. Its eyes glowed with the light of stars, teeth protruded as taloned fingers from gums, and its body was a long, serpentine thing scaled in shared secrets and armoured with treacherous friends.

  “Be ready.” Silenos growled, already assuming his war-form. “An Entity approaches.” He examined its magic, careful not to look at the thing dead-on and get an unforgettable glance behind the curtains of reality. Its power was great. Greater than his, to be sure, though a trifling thing besides the magic of certain other specimens he’d encountered here.

  With Adonis, it would have been a trivial opponent. Without him it might well be the death of them.

  “How do we fight it?” Hexeri asked, always the more pragmatic.

  “Will.” Silenos told her. “Concentrate upon it, use your intent to wound. Ground it through anatomy, experience, hatred- whatever focus works best. But ensure that every strike lands with the intent of killing and destroying. And do not, at any point, assume it to be dead.”

  There was time to say nothing else. The Entity’s great wings- rainbows protruding from its backs and rotting at the edges- crested the air and it swooped down towards them as a coiling, arcane missile. He raised his shield, flooded the air with flames, and steeled his mind. The Entity collided with him in an explosion to fragment stone and rend steel, yet its shockwave perished millimetres in the air and did nothing. They shot back, straining against one another with magic and might.

  Perhaps, Silenos mused, he should have simply done battle with Adonis. Perhaps a single enemy of greater power than himself would have presented shorter odds than these.