There were things that could only be seen before they could be understood, and I know I would try to explain what I was seeing, but I still understand that I will fail to paint the right picture.
You have to be here to understand that my world stopped when I saw that tentacle rising from the earth.
Let me try to bring you to my mind, so you can glimpse a bit of what I see. Again, I would fail, but perhaps that is a mercy.
The pyramid had been growing in my vision for the past mile, but seeing it from this angle, under the red sky, where the black stone drank the red light and gave nothing back, was different.
The scale of it pressed against my perception the way I have heard that the deep ocean separating the continents presses against a diver’s chest.
Thirty kilometres of black stone or metal or whatever it is that had fallen from the sky ten thousand years ago, and it had been waiting. All this time, it had been waiting.
And now, I believe it was waking.
The tentacle was the first sign I was not dealing with anything the Academy or common sense could prepare me for.
I could barely understand the Khaazim, beings the size of houses but moving with the speed of a hare, but how could something like that exist?
It was white as bone, segmented like a worm’s body, and it thrust from the earth at the pyramid’s southern base, arcing upward into the red sky. The base of it was wider than the camp had been.
The length of it, I could not see the end. It rose and rose, disappearing into the clouds, and the clouds moved around it, swirling, as if the sky itself was avoiding its touch.
I wish you could see it, but I also wish you could not.
The army beneath it was almost an afterthought.
Tens of thousands. Khaaz in dense formations, their tendrils weaving together, their chitin gleaming in the red light. Khaazim standing in ranks behind them, hundreds of them, their tails raised like a forest of spears.
Flying around the tentacle were tens of Narghul Sorcerers, and although most of them had two horns, there were some with three horns, and those were clearly bigger, standing almost ten feet tall.
And hovering between them, moving through the ranks with the slow deliberation of a general inspecting troops, something I had not seen before.
It was human-shaped. Upright. But where the Narghul Sorcerer had been red-skinned and horned, this thing was pale, almost translucent, its skin showing the dark network of veins beneath. Its eyes were not burning; it had none, just a blank, smooth translucent covering.
All of their attention was focused on the massive tentacle, and they seemed to be digging it out of the ground.
I now realized that a majority of the demons were focused on the Queen of the Swarm and only a small fraction had been sent to hunt me.
The southern face was death. There was no edging through that; the army stretched from the pyramid’s foot to the horizon.
I kept saying tens of thousands, but I knew the number of demons had to be more, but my mind seemed to refuse to acknowledge any number higher than this.
"Right, I am not going towards a tentacle that makes a mountain look like a pebble."
I pulled the lightning domain in close, barely ten meters, and I edged east along the pyramid’s base, keeping the black faceted wall on my left shoulder and the horror at my back, blinking the gaps where the swarm thickened and letting the field eat anything that committed to me.
It was slow, disciplined work, the opposite of the run across the plain. Here, this close to the source, every demon I passed felt aimed, drawn toward the southern muster by the Queen’s will, and I was a stone going crosswise to a river that wanted to be somewhere else.
And then, a hundred metres around the corner onto the eastern face, the river stopped as I discovered that the eastern side was empty.
∞
If I did not have Storm Sense, I would not have felt a subtle hum in front of the eastern face of the pyramid that seemed to have driven the demons away from it, as if the field made them blind to this area of the pyramid.
Someone had cast a very clever spell here, and I could see the reason for that.
There was a seam halfway along the wall.
I blinked twice, and it was still there.
For ten thousand years, mages have been trying to get into the pyramid, and in front of me was a doorway into it.
I saw the vertical dark line in the black facets, a dozen storeys tall, the edges too clean to be natural, and red fog slowly emerged from it.
If this were a door, then it was built for giants that stood thousands of feet tall.
The position of this door was precisely in the place where Scholar Orath and the Adepts had been standing in the morning.
Whatever this Ascension Ritual was, they knew it would awaken the demons, and everything had been planned beforehand; the door was open, and perhaps the answers to this madness could be found within.
I looked at the charms on my wrist and touched the bell once, to remind me that everything I was seeing was real because I was about to do something I may not return from.
This loop, maybe it was related to this pyramid, and entering it may lead to unknown consequences, but I needed answers.
I do not know what I could find inside; maybe it was far worse than anything out here, but I will only learn the truth by searching for it.
I looked behind me at the massive tentacles and hordes of demons and then stepped through the doorway.
The red sky and the screaming world cut off behind me as if a hand had closed over them.