Calliope was already preparing the spell she would use to take her from this place. The moment the insolent… what? She didn’t really have a term or concept of who Beren was or where he was from and as such was critically short of adjectives. Monk. The moment the insolent monk was paste she could take to the sky and. The Firbolg tumbled out of sight and down the sheer face of the escarpment. The outcome was so unlikely it took a minute for her mind to take it in. She stepped over to the edge and peered down in time to see the ancient creature bounce of a jagged rock formation and impale itself on the top of a tree, the broken trunk protruding from its chest like an impaling stake. The drop was so far that it seemed like a child’s toy. The thing wasn’t dead, such things were not really alive to become dead, but it would fade from this plain over the next few hours. If the tree survived it might take some of the magical essence of the creature into itself, perhaps in fifty years it would become a shrine famed for its healing sap, or fruit that granted strange powers or visions. There were few such places in the world, because few such beings had ever been banished. Either there was more to Beren than met the eye, or the creatures of the void had grown weaker in the eons she had slumbered.

 

“You might have warned me,” Beren complained, his face sheened with the sweat of the brief combat.

“Do you wish that I give you warnings?” Calliope asked archly. Beren scowled at her then turned to the stone doorway.

“How do we use this thing?” Beren asked, reaching out to put his hand through the arch. It emerged from the other side perfectly naturally. Calliope drew a sharp fingernail across the ball of her thumb to draw a single drop of blackish blood which she flicked at the gate with a smooth motion. The droplet hit an invisible plane in the middle of the gate as though it held a pane of glass. It splattered outwards but instead of being limited by physicality it continued to spread until it filled the stone gateway with a darkness that twinkled with stars. Beren made some kind of sign, which Calliope assumed to be religious, perhaps a charm against evil or bad luck. Calliope stepped through the gate and vanished.

 

The blackness of space stretched in all directions punctuated by a profusion of stars, they were on a stretch of land which hung supported by nothing, perhaps a hundred feet wide on which a road of silver glass had been laid. The road stretched off into infinity, though at various points it widened or narrowed, in some cases wide enough to support ancient crumbling castles or strange alien-looking temples on misshapen islands. Nor was this the only road. The void was crisscrossed with them, some were on the same plane, others were below them. The side view made them look like triangular divots that a giant had taken from the earth with an immense trowel. One section, perhaps two hundred yards distance had a small mountain, down which a river poured to vanish into the void, its cascades shot through by uninterrupted starlight so that it shone with a bejeweled prismatic glow. Others were draped with grass, or vines, even small trees which seemed alien and unearthly. The experience was disorienting, not just because of the impossible landscape but because the transition was wrong, it was like falling forward into gelatinous mud which slowed you just enough that it robbed you of balance and perspective and left you chilled and trembling.

 

That moment of disorientation very nearly ended Calliope’s long life as a blade the size of a wagon bed swept at head. Beren stumbled into her back, knocking her forward just enough that it swept over both their heads. Calliope rolled and came up on her feet. A figure of black glass, ten feet tall and with a glowing blue sigil on its forehead lifted its great spear for a second strike. The figure appeared to be a single crystal, intricately carved with armor familiar to Calliope from her own time but doubtlessly archaic to Beren. It was female and its face would have been lovely if it wasn’t contorted in naked hatred. The spear arced down by Calliope threw up her hands and spoke two words in Aklo. There was a thunderous detonation which shook hundreds of jeweled fruits from a nearby tree in a glittering rain. The spear seemed to lodge in the air, quivering a foot above Calliope’s head. Calliope turned to smoke, surging skyward, or starward, like a hunting falcon. The glass woman, leaped upwards to follow but the semi-corporeal Calliope twisted around, expanding to grapple with the thing. Words tore from her lips, each profane syllable tearing at what passed for reality. Beams of blackness surged from Calliope’s hands but the glass thing deflected them away, the sigil burning bright enough that it hurt the eyes to look upon. It hurled its spear at the sorceress, blue flames playing down its length like a lightning bolt. Calliope writhed around the spear as it flew, like a serpent, then seemed to solidify, her hand now gripping the haft of the vast weapon, impossibly she turned it and drove it down at its owner, who thrust forth a palm to shatter the weapon, sending the smoke that was Calliope spinning off to the side. The glass thing drew a sword from its body and followed, but Calliope turned and crashed into it, the two figures meeting in a combat that looked physical but was anything but. The glass figure caught Calliope around the waist and lifted her high, eerily silent despite its apparent triumph. Ropes of darkness leaped up from the stone lintel on its lonely island and wrapped the thing’s legs. Calliope turned back to smoke and soared free of her enemy’s grasp. It tried to follow but the cords around its legs bound it like a leash. Calliope screamed one final word in Aklo and the cords contracted snapping the glass thing down against the top of the gate with the force of a mangonel. The glass statue struck the gate and exploded, showering Beren with fragments and making him shield his eyes. When he opened them, Calliope was standing beside him. Her clothing had changed into a suit of obsidian armor beneath a great coat that seemed to be composed of the ebony scales of some vast serpent.

“What…” the monk asked. Calliope stepped past him and picked up one of the fragments. It was the sigil and a piece of the creature’s face. The sigil was electrum laid into the broken volcanic glass that had been the thing’s forehead. Calliope turned it over in her hands.

“Leti,” she muttered. Beren stiffened, the names of the Seven Accursed were not spoken of.

“That is one of the Seven Shards,” he asked, “you… killed one.” Calliope wondered if he was thinking that she was one of the Seven Shards of Darkness and if she would be offended.

“Leti,” Calliope repeated, and tossed the sigil to Beren, it was still warm to his touch and seemed to writhe as if alive. “It is her soul anyway.” Beren dropped the sigil as though hot. It clattered rather prosaically on the glass road.

 

“If you have her soul is she not destroyed?” Beren demanded. Calliope shook her head.

“No it…you Xebrian is not good enough for me to explain, just imagine this is part of herself she left here without diminishing the whole.”

 

“Could you do that?” Beren asked. Calliope shrugged.

“Of course.”

“Why did she leave a piece of her soul to guard a doorway?” he asked, as though that were the only route into the topic he could find.

 

“It wasn’t here to guard the doorway,” Calliope explained, “it was here to kill me.” Beren stared at her for a moment.

“Aren’t you like… friends?” he asked. Calliope dissolved into peels of very human laughter, it took her several seconds to get a hold of herself.

“Oh you are serious?” she asked. Beren nodded, which sent her into even more gales of laughter.

“If you are quite done?” Beren asked pointedly, nodding to the sigil laying on the road. Calliope contemptuously kicked it, sending it skittering to the edge of the land where it tumbled off into endless darkness.

 

“Even during the days of the Quest, we seven competed for Iskandrin’s favor, competition was usually….vigorous,” Calliope explained. The Seven had spent as much time backstabbing each other as they had advancing their master’s cause, each determined to gather the most knowledge, to be the strongest, to gain any advantage over their rivals.

 

“So much so that she left a statue to kill you?” Beren pressed. Calliope pressed her lips together in thought.

“She knows that I… well it doesn’t matter. The more pertinent point is that she didn’t leave this here thousands of years ago, this is a new working. That means….” Calliope fell silent. All that time she had been entombed she had assumed that she was the only one of the Seven who had survived, that she had been specifically targeted to affect her Master’s return, but what if that wasn’t true. This spell was less than a thousand years old, which meant Leti was out there. Had she also been spared, had they all? And if so were they out there working to free Iskandarin? They would have to be, the same geas bound them as did her. It was probably only because Beren had freed her that his claim was temporarily preeminent. Could Beren have accidentally freed her of her obligation, or if not freed at least postponed the call?

 

“Your world, is it…” she struggled for a word in Xebrian, she would need to learn his uncouth language at some point if she couldn’t teach him to speak like a civilized person.

“…beset by great evils?” she finished. To be fair Leti was a clumsy amateurish evil in Calliope's view, but in these age perhaps the stupid trollop had managed to make herself queen of the world or something. Beren pondered it.

“No more than normal?” he replied with a shrug. Well if Leti and the others were free, they hadn’t yet had time to begin working their schemes. Perhaps she and Leti were the only survivors, or at least the only ones who had so far woken up. It was a lot to take in. Leti awoke early enough to find Calliope. It was likely she had been responsible, directly or indirectly, for scattering her cult, and she had left her assassin, knowing that Calliope would eventually try to use the gates. She would have succeeded if Beren hadn’t stumbled onto her. Killing Calliope was no simple matter, but the spear had been imbued with potent magics that would have managed it.

“That,” Calliope said as her mind refocused, “is likely to change.”

[@POOHEAD189]