Felix descended into Etrionn. Inside, as promised by the ridges and bumps against the scales, was a wonder. A warren of chambers and corridors extended in every direction, though everything was tilted on its side, some even upside down. The ridges he'd spotted before were, in fact, actual structures. Entire buildings had been layered inside the beast. As Felix drifted down on a tether of lightning, he wondered where, precisely, Etrionn's organs existed.

"Was this thing ever alive?" he asked the quiet. It didn’t answer. He supposed he was thankful for that. He touched down and got his bearings.

It looked as if he'd walked into a palace. Tumbled, yes. Broken, of course. But above him, tiled floors still shone with a hint of polish. The hexagonal pillars, though mired in strange, organic webbing and thick roots, were still intricately carved, flecks of gilding obvious along the designs of vines and stars. Everything was made in the manner of the Nym. Soaring, vaulted ceilings were beneath his feet, marked with numerous fist-sized Belais crystals clustered at every apex. None of them contained any magic.

He fed them his Mana, and they kindled into a blaze that spread down corridors like fire in a channel of oil. The pathway was random, owing perhaps to disconnected or broken connective sigaldry somewhere deep in the masonry, but it provided more than enough light to see the glory of the Walking City.

Tentatively, Felix tapped the Belais crystal with his Will. Unsurprisingly, they did not offer up any further functions. While the purple crystals were used as power sources and control nodes across Nymean ruins, those were always significantly larger. These were nothing more than illumination. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

"It’s beautiful in here.” Pit appeared in a flash of light out of his Spirit, an immense tenku that barely dented the space around them. The scale of this thing was such that a dozen more of him could have stood in that hall before their wings would have brushed the walls. "Do you think the Nym lived in here?"

"They must have." Felix stepped carefully along the ridged beams that were once the ceiling. "This place looks like a palace. Here, at least. I wonder if it changes as we go.”

“Which way, though?" Pit looked around. There were six obvious directions they could travel, though only four of them featured the broken chain of Belais lights.

Unseen Beholder. Flows of magic were obvious all around the pair of them, and Felix tracked hundreds of mingling combinations from every direction. Nothing gave him an indication of where they should go.

"This way, I guess," he said, orienting himself toward where he supposed the head was located. "Come to think of it: did Etrionn have a head, Paxus?"

“I believe so.” The plant at his side twitched, and the small spirit of the Nymean scholar appeared in a haze of static. "Damnation. It appears Etrionn is providing some resistance.”

Felix gripped his sword. “Karys?”

“The same is true for me,” Karys’ halting voice buzzed into the air, cut with irritating gaps between syllables. "I can perceive little of where you are, and it takes a great deal of my focus to even project my voice to you."

"Alright, don’t strain yourselves, either one of you. Pit and I will investigate. I’ll reach out soon."

“As you Will, your Majesty.”

“Of course, Felix.”

The plant and sword went quiet, and Felix tucked them both into his belt. He looked to Pit. “Shall we?”

His Companion gave a fluting whistle, threaded with a small amount of nervous fear. “Guess so.”

They started walking deeper into Etrionn, though perhaps jumping would have been a better description. The supports of the ceiling-floor were all fifteen feet tall and jutting from the patterned stonework like the true ribs of Etrionn they replaced. Felix idly wondered if that was by design—if the whole inner workings were simply replacement parts for They Who Held Up The Sky. Had it been injured, and the Nym were caring for it? Why else would it have put up with the warrens around him? No matter how refined their architecture, Felix wouldn’t have wanted a single hut constructed in his guts.

As the pair of them traversed the place, many such questions crowded Felix’s thoughts. They ducked through tall stone doors, ceiling-high and flung wide open, though many were loose on their hinges and riddled with cracks. Alcoves by the thousands filled the space farther toward the floor, lit by their own delicately grown crystals, often around the frame of a gorgeous mural Felix could only half-discern through the haze of distance. Stars worked into geometric patterns filled the walls, each packed with detail and no little gilding.

Pit ducked through another doorway, this one with broken panels that leaned precariously against one another. He pulled his wings close to his body as they stepped through. “I might have to start shifting Masks,” the tenku muttered. “Why aren’t we flying again?”

“I’m worried we’ll miss something.” Felix paused for the thousandth time, peering down a collection of hallways leading into the distant dark. “This place is a maze.”

“Why not just eat all of this?” Pit sneezed again as a flow of Mana vapor curled over him. It was a thick one. “Gah! If you’d eaten it, we wouldn’t’ve had to worry about the scales or anything, right? We could’ve just waltzed through and found the Bell.”

“Thought of it, but the control I have over my Empyrean Embrace is…it’s not a delicate tool. It’s weaponized hunger, and something like this would be too tempting.” Felix could feel the Beast watching him, judging perhaps, but eager nonetheless. “Yeah, I’m talking about you.”

The Coward Does Not Appeal To Me.

“Oh really?” Felix snorted. “Since when are you so picky?”

It Is Not Ours.

“Not—As in you don’t have the Authority to eat Etrionn?”

Pit quirked his head at that. “Why not?”

The Beast didn’t answer. “Fine, be that way. Besides, I wouldn’t eat this place, anyway. We don’t know what’s down here, Pit. Ruins have more than just treasure—it’s chock full of art and history and—” He sighed. “The point is the finding of it, not just the Bell.”

"But that's all we need, right? To fight the Ruin?"

"It's a piece of the puzzle, Pit, but it's not everything. Even with all three pieces of the Empyrean Regalia—” Felix cut himself off. “Come, through here."

Without another word, Pit followed. Down and sideways, they traversed the ancient halls across the ceiling. Sometimes the chambers were misaligned, no doubt from Etrionn's fall. However it had happened, it forced the pair of them to squeeze through, often forcing Pit to converge with Felix's Spirit. A few times, the tightening doorways gave them no choice but to crowd into the Dire Hound, with Felix riding shotgun in his Companion's chest.

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Yet even with that chaos, most everything remained virtually untouched for Ages. Tapestries still hung—upside down now and smeared with some sort of discoloring rot, but almost whole. Statues were cracked but intact, the visages of Nymean men and women prominent amongst the varied smatterings of many other Races. Geist featured the second most often, while hundreds of others were depicted in murals and statuary commemorating everything from some magical construct to what looked like a bountiful harvest.

Even here, in their vaunted halls, the Nym had celebrated the simplest of things and their contributors. Why else feature a random Delven woman amid a riot of amethyst-carved spring blossoms but to raise up their people. Perhaps they were leaders in some way, but there were no plaques commemorating their achievements, and the murals were too vague for him to grasp much context. Even the art’s Lore entries were empty.

It was a strange thing, almost as odd as the very nature of the place he traversed. Questions plucked at his Mind over and over: why was the beast hollow? How could it live like this? Presumably, the thing walked the length and breadth of the Continent, carrying the Nym upon its back, not to mention inside its guts. The unknown magical ingenuity of the Golden Empire had something to do with it all, Felix was certain, but much of it seemed to rely on the creature itself.

“More roots here, too.” He spoke quietly, but every sound carried as if it were a shout.

“They’re tethering…everything,” Pit said from across the chamber. It was three hundred feet wide, narrower than their starting place—a good sign. “Anywhere the buildings meet Etrionn’s flesh.”

Other than the Nymean architecture, the only other constants were the organic webbing and the roots. Felix had noticed them when they’d first entered, and their presence had never slackened. The webbing was more tissue than silk, stretching across the backs of walls—fascia, essentially. Felix considered them a natural consequence of building inside a once-living creature and didn’t pay much attention to their presence. More notable were the roots. They were everywhere. At first, he thought they were just where the Kingsaps had penetrated the place. Etrionn had been laying in place for thousands of years, after all—plenty of time for nature to start claiming it back, had the Crescian Bronze allowed such a thing.

No way. The Will in Etrionn’s armor had refused to even allow Felix to pass through, let alone take root in its substructure. These are different.

The roots were thick, and according to his Unseen Beholder, they were known as Roots of the Aberrant Soil. Unfortunately, it told him little more than that. The Lore entry wasn’t blank like the various art pieces around him, but it was certainly opaque.

Lore: A piece of home, clutched close.

The roots roamed across the walls, up the etched and gilded hexagonal pillars, and across the beams of the ceiling. They did not stray toward the floors, as if the roots still avoided where people once walked. They showed no reaction to him, of course. He stepped on a few, and they were firm. The texture to them was rough, covered in fine, hair-like tendrils, much like any root. They also weren’t desiccated like the rest of Etrionn's flesh, though he saw a few places where the roots seemed to connect and merge with the beast.

"A piece of home," Felix muttered. "Something it took with it when it left whatever Realm it came from."

In the end, it was an oddity, but he’d seen too much on the Continent to get hung up on it for long. Just as striking as the Roots of the Aberrant Soil was the fact that this ruin, unlike every other one Felix had visited, lacked a single trap of any kind. At first, he thought maybe that was why everything felt different—the detail putting him on edge—but the farther they traveled, rising up through changing elevation, the more Felix rejected that idea.

There was a feeling that was far different than any ruin he'd ever entered. They were walking through a corpse, and Felix believed it should have felt like it. Instead, there was a sensation of... Felix couldn't quite name it, but it felt peaceful. Solemn. Not a graveyard solemnity, but like the air was thick with meaning. Importance. Every step felt like he was walking through an ancient cathedral, though there was not a single ounce of religious iconography.

The Nymean stars were everywhere. They weren’t any more venerated than the nameless people filling every alcove. The stars were a motif, same as nature itself, something the Nymeans seemed to treasure. Felix always thought their depictions of stars meant their magic, just as the vines and flowers represented the world around them. Both of those observations felt right, and from what he'd learned of the Nymeans, they were fascinated by their magic, as well as stewards of the Green Wilds. It fit.

Previous ruins featured them as well, of course, but where those felt like empty stone, this had a certain spark to it. For all their ingenious technology or even surviving art, those other ruins had been largely lifeless. Despite Etrionn's death, there was a pulse around them as they moved. Currents of magic shifted about constantly. He noticed them early on with Unseen Beholder, and they only grew more numerous as they’d explored. They came in two varieties, vaporous like smoke and thick like jellied rivers.

The hazy clouds split around their bodies and trailed between their fingers, lingering toward the ceiling as if they had risen there from the floor, despite gravity no longer applying in the same way it once had. The liquid rivers of Mana were a bit more unpredictable. They threaded through the air in switchback currents, moving and branching around, sometimes pressing close to the ceiling where they walked, and other times tangling amongst where the floor was high above them.

The few times they ran into them, they were so potent as to be tangible, pushing Felix and Pit aside as their complicated, multi-hued lengths surged in unpredictable flows. Pit certainly didn't like them. Whenever they brushed near his head, it forced him to sneeze. He endured with many grumbles.

“Wish you could eat all this damn Mana,” he said, and not for the first time.

Felix patted his friend absently, eyes tracking a thousand details around them. “We’re close to the end, I think. The head is close.”

The chambers were narrowing, the rooms becoming more ornate, replete with stylized carvings across the face of nearly every other wall panel. Vines and flowers abounded, etched from stone or ancient wood, with small woodland critters picked out with precious gemstones. The far-off floors became labyrinthine textures, geometric patterns that repeated infinitely, recursively in a way that was dizzying to behold. Felix tried not to look up.

Soon after that, they found a door.

It was the first door that was not only whole but latched shut. More than that, it was locked. Felix grinned. They were on the right track.

It was a wide portal, a door carved from golden stone, inlaid with onyx, silver, and malachite in strange ripples that surrounded three stars: a four-point, a six-point, and an eight-point star, rising vertically up the length of the door.

"Beautiful.” Felix hunted for a handle, but other than the ornate lock, there was nothing.

Pit ran a paw across its surface. “Feels…squishy. Why does it feel squishy?”

“Really?” Felix put his hand against the rippling stone, but the moment his fingers made contact, two distinct noises rang out. The first was a notification.

Authority Recognized!

Welcome, Inheritor!

Do You Wish To Access The Empyrean Halls?

Felix’s heart sped up as his grin bared his sharpened teeth. He almost replied when the second sound started up. It was a strident buzzing interlaced with a crooning chord—coming from his hip.

“Oh hell yes.”

One of many pouches there was trembling, the Garment’s leather turning slightly translucent as whatever was inside gave off an incredible amount of light. Felix flipped it open eagerly, and that radianced sprayed outward like a fountain. Orange, red-gold, and deepest green-blue, it shifted across the spectrum of colors as fast as Felix could blink. Not strobing, but a smooth transition between vibrancies that was nearly hypnotic.

He fished out the source of it all. An orb the size of his fist, made of Crescian Bronze, and it weighed far more than its size would suggest, as if something sloshed within it.

Name: Eye of Tumult

Type: Path (Enhancement)

Lore: All Paths come to an end. Seek the last resting place of the Obsidian Tumult and summon forth your courage, magus. You shall need it.

Pit squinted against its light. "Whoa, what's going on with that?"

He'd received the item inside Aja Nadir, the City at the Edge of Night inside a Dark Passage. It had been a reward for dispatching Castarius, the…creature that had been entombed within the Fortress of Starlight’s Rise. Most importantly, however, its Type was a Path (Enhancement)---the same as the Omen Key he’d received a long time ago.

An upgrade.

Felix grinned. He’d been hoping for this. "Things just got a lot more promising."