"What’s going on? Why are we running?" Wendell asked, rushing toward the bowsprit. Felix remained perched there as clouds whipped around them and the sails billowed with conjured air Mana. The islands fell behind them at a glacial pace, their sheer bulk so great that even their high speed struggled to leave them behind.

Felix closed his Authority Screen and the map he was checking along with it. "Desolation."

"And what is that?" Evie asked.

"It's something that shouldn't happen here." Felix clenched his jaw as his Mind whirled through possibilities. "Desolation is where the Cognitive Realm—the Void—and the Ethereal Realm…intersect."

“The Ethereal?” The words came out like a squeak from Loquis and he cleared his throat with a glance toward Evie. He lowered his voice. “What do you mean?”

“Imagine a giant white hole in an endless sea of pure darkness. It looks like an inverted black hole.”

"You’ve seen it?” When Felix nodded, Loquis sputtered. “No one sees the Ethereal! That’s the afterlife!"

Evie snorted. “According to who?”

“To about half the Continent?”

Felix shrugged and hopped off the bowsprit. He slipped between Wendell, Evie, and Loquis, heading back toward the helm. "I don’t know anything about that, but the Ethereal is as real as the Void and the Continent—and it’s a million times more dangerous.”

Felix mounted the steps, taking two at a time. “It creates these white holes.”

“White holes?” Archie asked as he passed. “Those are a thing?”

“They are and they suck. It’s just a—” Felix slammed his hands together. “A confluence of everything. Literally everything, crushed together. In the Void it would spit things out like debris from a polluted ocean. The Korvaa I stayed with collected hundreds of things ejected out of its edge. Bits of wood from old ships, walls from cities no one’s ever seen, and Xtreme Dirt Biking magazines from Earth.”

“For real? I loved—my friend loved that magazine.”

Felix stopped at the top of the stairs. “You’re not getting it. If you get caught up in a Desolation, you’re not just knocked around. You’re obliterated. Worse than those Dustbringers. Like the Chthonic Star on steroids.”

"And you're saying, there's one here?" Wendell looked around anxiously. "Where?"

“I don’t know,” Felix admitted. “I’ve been checking the Territory map, hoping it’ll show me something, but it can barely keep track of the Dark Passages.” He pointed behind them, where the three islands were finally fading into the distance. “You saw that city. Wendell, you saw it too. Those spherical chunks missing from it—was there anything special about them?”

"The edges were sharp," Wendell said slowly. "Of course. The rest of the city. Its buildings were all rounded with wind and time. A result of aging who knows how many years. But those spherical cuts were different—they hadn’t rounded at all. If the wind is constantly blowing like this, then they happened recently."

Felix nodded. "My thoughts exactly. There were pirates in the Void."

"What, seriously?" Beef asked, joining in.The Kobolds made their way up the stairs too, until all the Unbound plus Evie and Loquis were crowded around Elowen and the wheel.

“Yeah seriously,” Pit shouted from above.

“You think pirates did this?” Kevin asked, looking unreasonably excited by the idea.

“I don’t know, but they were the only ones I’ve seen that used the Desolation to power their shields. It was huge and impossible to move, which makes me question whether this was caused by a weapon or—”

“Or one of these white holes showed up and chewed through it,” Evie finished his thought.

Felix nodded slowly before kneeling down at the base of the wheel. He detached a panel, behind which were a slew of inscribed parts, all of them glowing as Mana moved through them. “That’s the worst of all options. Pirates we can fight. The Desolation…that’s beyond us.”

He squeezed his hand past inscribed plates and down into the base. "As far as I know, the white holes can't move. But the Dark Passage is crazy unstable." With his other hand, Felix pulled up his map again and flicked it toward everyone. "Look at the dark purple lines. Those are the Dark Passages."

"It's jumping around," Beef said.

Evie’s mouth was a grim line. "Like a worm wriggling on a hook."

"Exactly. I don't think a Desolation attacked this place. I think the Dark Passage fell into a Desolation."

"Yyero’s blighted ass…"

"Yeah."

"How do we avoid that?” Shadow asked.

“We get the fuck out," Archie said before hunkering down next to Felix. “How do we get this hunk of junk to fly faster?”

“I’m working on it,” Felix muttered, pushing his hand further into the base. It vanished up to his forearm now. “There it is!”

His fingers touched a faceted edge, and the moment he did, Felix knew he’d been right: below the helm was a reinforced cache of one hundred Domain cores, each hooked up to a complicated network of sigaldry that connected them with the entire ship. A power bank, separate from the engines that pulsed belowdecks. Mana fluttered at his touch, information flowing through his Mind as his body formed a circuit with the cores; Felix knew then that most of them were half full, owing perhaps to recent use and Ages long storage.

Time to fix that.

Mana flowed out of him and into the array beneath the deck. He supposed there was a better way to recharge the cores, but Felix didn’t have time to find an owner’s manual—brute force always was his forte, after all. The cores whined, Mana surging into them in a torrent that filled them up in a matter of seconds.

“Whoa,” Shadow stepped back, staring at the ground. They all did. “What’s with the light show?”

Prismatic lines flowed outward from the helm, spreading in a wave through the grains of the deck, up the shrouds and masts, before extending into each and every sail. Immediately, they billowed outward with a thunderous crack, filled with an ineffable power that was nothing like previously.

“Gah!” Elowen grabbed onto the wheel as the ship lurched forward, kicking into a new gear as clouds streamed past. “Warn a girl next time!”

Felix pulled his arm free, grinning. “I—”

The silvery-blue sky flickered, the fuzzed clouds turning almost pixelated before jittering out of existence entirely. The empty horizon buckled beneath an invisible weight, and new clouds boiled into being, bellies dark, as if a storm were being birthed directly in their path.

A black stain spread and all too quickly, things punched through the dark clouds.

“Monsters!”

Felix bared his teeth as a tidal wave of monstrosities poured out of the unstable sky. They screeched out a hungry violence that scoured the ship with a discordant burr. He could feel it ripple across their Spirits, an attack of the soul meant to weaken their prey.

They hadn't counted on Felix.

"Voidbeasts," he said, his teeth lengthening into fangs. He tossed the Authority map toward Elowen. "Keep this ship moving along the Passage! The rest of you: kill anything that gets in our way."

A savage cheer rose from his people, but it was drowned out by a crack of thunder.

Adamant Discord!

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Felix shot forward, lightning bathing his Body as Pit dove screeching to his side. Tenebrils swarmed him, their bulbous bodies looking like nothing so much as a knot of mottled grey tentacles. Barbed appendages slashed at Felix and Pit, a multi-hued vapor releasing from between the gaps in their bodies as thousands crashed into them. Once upon a time, Felix would have run from so many—they were ravenous beasts, wanting nothing more than to consume every ounce of his Mana. They hadn’t changed a single bit.

He had.

Multi-Cast!

Astrum Ascendance!

Sonata of Dominance!

Wild Threnody!

Beams of fire, shadow, and air erupted all around him, tearing through hundreds of Tenebrils at once before spreading, carried on by each press of his Will and Intent. The creatures were vaporized, their bodies turned to char and smoke.

“Nimbus of the Moon!” Pit screeched. He flew among the horde, his four wings hurling hundreds of voidbeasts aside as he lashed out with beak and claw. Brilliant silver moonbeams dropped around him, punching down through the monsters and eradicating them wholesale.

The Tenebrils thinned out, replaced by a secondary wave of Harrowings. They looked like arrowheads forged of obsidian and equipped with massive claws that tore into the remaining Tenebrils. They devoured them, cannibalizing the voidbeasts before the rest swept into Felix. Felix remembered them as obscenely fast and near invisible—but they weren’t in the Void anymore.

Talons reached for him but he slapped their attacks away, sundering a dozen with a single blow of his empty palm. Spears of frozen lightning spread outward in a sphere, launched from Pit’s four wings and skewering five at a time before they exploded. The electrical storm built off of one another, eradicating hundreds more.

Felix hauled forward, steel lines of blue gathered in his fist as he tore voidbeast bodies to shreds with the very connection of violence he shared with them. Colorless Mana oozed from their flesh, spraying in a cloud all around them that drew in yet more of the beasts.

Empyrean Embrace!

Felix ate them all.

The ship surged past them, but they kept pace, joined now by the Chimeras that fought down the voidbeasts that inevitably swarmed wide of Felix and Pit's assault. More appeared, worse and larger creatures that resembled wriggling serpents, not unlike the eels that had attacked them, as well as hulking and fanged fish, like piranhas the size of a small house. They careened through the liminal space, their Passage widening the rift into the Void behind them. The horde screeched with a hunger-sharpened aggression tearing into one another as much as they sought out Felix’s people. But there was more than that. Their Spirits were panicked, even the largest of beasts resonating with a primal fear—all of it directed back toward the Void.

Elowen piloted the ship through thickening cloudbanks and murmurations of writhing voidflesh, his friends and Legion tearing their way through before the jittering fog tossed them all. The ship bucked, hitting turbulence like cresting a wave, and Felix shot ahead on a bolt of lightning.

Before them, a horde of approaching monsters vanished into a pale horizon. Their bodies didn’t fade into smoke or dissolve into dust, but were simply…unmade.

“Desolation!” Felix warned, shouting with every ounce of his Temper. “Bank to starboard!”

Shouts rang out from the decks but Elowen was swift. She hauled on the wheel, kicking the Sunaran ship nearly sideways as it tilted into a sharp right turn. Guidelines popped and tore, while the whine of stressed Mana engines roared.

Felix flew ahead, seizing the clouds with songs of air and water before dispersing them. He could see it now. The enormous spinning disk of a Desolation cut into their path, splitting out of a jagged portal into the Void. It stretched across the silvery-blue sky, almost indistinguishable from the clouds that backed it, though the swirling arm of it that spiraled out lashed across things like a reaping scythe.

More voidbeasts fell, unmade by the touch of Desolation. Even their screams bled out into silence.

The Passage around them flexed like flesh around a gaping wound, fighting against the Desolation's intrusion and failing. The ship careened upwards, carried on another wave of unstable Mana.

"Felix!" Evie shouted from where she clung to the shrouds. "We have to get out!"

"I don't know where we'll end up! We're not near the edge of this Passage."

"Wherever we end up, it's better than that!"

Authority Screen Territorial Map

The display glitched harder than ever, clearly affected by the Desolation’s presence. Worse, the Dark Passage no longer wriggled but skipped across the map. Felix just needed to find an edge and then he could rip it open.

Gotta time this right! Adamant Discord!

Felix tore through more voidbeasts as they crowded around them, an infinite swarm hungry for their Mana even as certain doom spun their way. Annoyed, he shot through them in an explosion of effluvia and colorless Mana, casting their lifeless flesh into the encroaching arm of Desolation.

And it was encroaching—the ripples through the Dark Passage increased as white nothingness spread. An accretion disc stretched wide, boiling clouds and turning nearby islands into ribbons of once-stone and former-forests. The ripples hit the ship, the origin of the turbulence, and they were dragged down. Elowen fought hard at the wheel, her Tome of the Witness burning bright, but she couldn’t lift an entire Manaship.

The Desolation pulled them to the edge.

Multi-Cast!

Astrum Ascendance!

Sonata of Dominance!

Felix shaped every single Mana type he could, weaving them all together in a familiar but updated pattern. A Fiendstone wall congealed out of the air, glowing a brilliant cyan and threaded with a vivid crimson. It was a hundred feet long and half as thick, a massive block of material that wrung out his Mana pool in a single desperate gasp. It struck the Desolation, scoring into the bulging disc of its spread like a bulwark as the ship rebounded off of its gleaming side.

“Hard bank!” Elowne howled and soldiers hauled on the lines. The sails shifted and Mana surged, soaking up those Domain cores as the engines screamed. The ship tilted, angled against the Fiendstone and only a dozen feet from the Desolation itself.

C’mon! Again!

The Fiendstone immediately dissolved, rendered into less than dust before it was absorbed by the Desolation. The burst of it tossed their ship like a wave, threatening to capsize them. Felix did it again.

The second wall was thicker than the last, but this time he angled it upward, and the abused hull of the ship ground against its smooth surface. They shot up, tilted away from the Desolation even as it tried to pull them back in. His Mana vanished with each working, but Felix had always had great regeneration—it replenished in seconds.

He could do this.

Bulwark after bulwark sent their ship grinding across the accretion edge, separating themselves from Desolation by the thinnest of margins. Perhaps due to its complicated construction, Fiendstone took a few seconds to unmake, giving them a tiny window of survival.

The voidbeasts noticed as well. They swarmed their ship, seeking safety as much as food. His people made them regret it. Skills raged across the decks, obliterating the frenzied horde. Archie's Molten Blades were busy as he slid through the air, leaping from creature to creature. Kevin had covered the deck in a net of vines and spitting flowers, each one like a mini-turret, firing poison-laden barbs. Shadow fired arrows that split into vast volleys, breaking the flocks of monstrosities apart, even as more erupted from the dark.

Felix gritted his teeth, channels raw as he shaped another thickened block before the ship smashed into its edge. Pieces of the hull spun off, unmade in the white, and one of the rear sails was unraveling—but they were doing it. The edge of the Desolation was ahead, and if they could gather the proper speed they could break through its pull.

“Elowen! Give it all the juice you—”

Felix’s words died on his tongue as an atonal buzzing scoured across his Affinity. Dissonance so deep and profound, it echoed within him with a frightful resonance and very nearly sent them tumbling into Desolation. Felix frantically forged another wall as an electrick shock tore through him from the back of his teeth to the tips of his toes. He twisted around, looking behind them.

The voidbeasts had changed. Tenebrils and Harrowings died, their bodies twisting upon themselves as if their blood had turned against them. They split open like eggs, the colorless undifferentiated Mana inside of them sucked up and back into the black.

The larger Void creatures buckled and twisted, their flesh bubbling, scales emerging where mottled skin once lay, and eyes of liquid purple bubbling from everywhere.

Flesh curse… It inundated his ship, and people began to scream as their exposed limbs smoked and bubbled. Felix reached out, devouring it from the air with vast gulps of his Skill—but it was like scooping water out of the ocean.

A deep bellow sounded from below.

Felix latched himself onto the side of the ship. With a grunt of effort, another Fiendstone wall erupted beside them and he stared downward with familiar horror.

Out of the broken darkness and streaked silver-blue skies, a monstrosity rose. It bellowed again, and it defied description, surpassing Felix's vision to encompass. So vast was it that it wasn't just arriving from below, it was the below. The entire direction was taken up by a wide, ravenous Whalemaw.

REUNION! the Beast cried from within. It clawed its way up from the abyss and onto the roots of his Divine Tree. Felix clutched at his chest, a sensation of terrible heartburn scouring his throat and bulging veins across his neck. SCION! Seize That Creature!

The Whalemaw charged them.

"Fly faster!" Felix cried, even though he knew it was useless. They were already going at their top speed. The Whalemaw ascended, but it was so vast that he was unsure how far away it truly was. Instead, around it came a cloud of twisted, cursed voidbeasts. These creatures rose up, devouring the swarm around them in a rush of corrupted crimson flesh and liquid purple eyes. Scaled tendrils reached out, fluid in their movements, as they snagged beast after beast, devouring them entirely.

Primordial Spawn, the Beast crowed. Brethren Twisted By The Divine! You Will Have Vengeance!

The Beast was hunger and rage, and it thundered at Felix. Instincts clawed at him, telling him to fight, but he wasn’t an animal. His people needed to escape—Felix had to give them that chance.

He pulled himself up onto the railing and perched there. "Beef! Take over for me!”

“What?” Beef’s large brown eyes were wide and panicked. “I can't do Fiendstone!”

Felix shaped another wall, depleting his Mana once again. “Add onto this! Do it with chitin. It'll give you time. Everyone, do not stop."

"What are you gonna do?" Evie asked.

"Something stupid." And with that, he leapt over the side of the ship, claws lengthening and mouth wide.

Toward the Whalemaw.

Yes!