Beyond the sensation of intense wrongness upon my psychic senses, the structures connected to the spires were fashioned with an intense meaninglessness that gave it the appearance of the place being made in a mad child’s dream. The only right angles we saw were happenstance, and even the lithe towers that loomed above us swayed and curved like undulating dancers, initially simply just being too large for us to easily notice at first glance.  

The deeper we moved, the fouler the feeling. A rank smell of putrid rot was in the air, and the ground began to grow more…organic as we walked. It was still hard and made of some weird stone-like substance, but it had the feel of striding upon a great carpet of some hairless, bestial skin. Odd mushrooms bloomed along orifices along the walls, and soon I stopped us from continuing further in, certain we were merely walking into a pocket dimension in the warp. 

I knew that to be impossible, but humans were not safe to traverse further, even with our psychic powers, and whatever was happening here, the guards outside knew we were to meet with someone and survive the tale. We backtracked, moving past the almost living architecture and turning into one of the larger ‘archways’ if one was generous enough to call such a blasted hole that particular term. 

Luck was with us, as no sooner had we entered that we heard voices. I don’t know if I was relieved or not that they sounded like locals, and around a ‘hall’ in the bend of the first warped chamber, two men appeared, speaking to one another in their bastard tongue. Immediately I recognized them. They were the men we saw on the first boat, before Garm’s village found us in the murk. 
“Cha skota,” one of them said, indicating me with a wave of his hand. He waved it over to another opening in the melted stone, and I gave a few quick words to acknowledge him. I stepped forward, Clara following suit closely. I moved past the two degenerates, but the one who spoke eyed me. I knew he could not recognize me, as he had not spotted me within the reeds. However, he placed a hand on my shoulder and peered deeply into my face. “Ey, wah co fo bata?” 

Lazarus had timed me before on my quick draw. My fasted on the gun range was firing three shots accurately at 1.37 seconds. I wish he were here now, because in my desperation I believed I beat my previous high score. In the same movement I drew my sidearm, I batted his hand away and fired three shots. The first two burst through the first dreg’s chest, and the last shot went clean through the head of the second man before his eyes could widen. The rapport of the shots was loud, but the stones seemed to absorb the noise rather than multiplying the echo as one might have feared from the spacious curves. I had observed the phenomena when we first entered, and I had counted on that here. 

“Why did you do that?” Selencia asked breathily, too cautious to scream at me. 

“He saw through me.” I remarked simply. “It wasn’t what he said. I saw it in his eyes.” 

“Hadrian is right. I could feel it…I think.” Emmaline remarked without extreme confidence. 

“So now where do we go? Not where he pointed us to enter, surely.” Clara said. 

“I think we should. We’re here in the belly of the beast. If we aren’t here to cut the head off the snake, we might as well leave.” I said. I also had the sinking suspicion that it wasn’t necessarily a trap, but boatman would have exposed us when we entered. However, it was just a hunch. We would have to see if I was right in my assumption.