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The nethermost hall, the one you reached passing through the reflection, is something that ought to be impossible. Not just because of the figures turning towards you, what used to be their heads reduced to wavering white flames burning on their stumps of a neck like abandoned candle-lights, sizzling with the heat of their own blood used as fuel… or because of the two hulking figures looming over you and Salicera, their bodies a parody of the human form, with their skin pulled by porcelain trinkets and metal hooks, revealing teeth and sinews. Their bulging muscles remind you of a dead war horse’s, stringy and blue, pulled tight by rigor mortis and hooked strings.
But that is still something you could deal with. The reek of dead skin makes you want to reek, but you can still stomach it.
The floating head is another matter. The young woman looking at you with a sombre expression slowly turns in the air, her hair floating around her like a monstrous jellyfish. It might as well be the missing head from the statue in the previous room, and the clammy, pale skin that still can be seen really makes you feel like it may be. If it’s so, it’s a bit too… organic to be an actual statue and you are reminded of the rituals and rapturous temptations of the Seven Sisters — unfortunate souls offering their bodies up to help one of them incarnate into this world.
As the head turns you notice once more then new skin overtaking the old, growing like mould on a wall: but it’s not pale, it’s a sable tone, and the eyes in the other half of the head are a deep shining blue, and the hair are turning smooth as silk and black as blindness. After what happened in the previous room, you can now know what ‘black as blindness’ means.
Kiengiri features. You are seeing the girl’s head being overtaken, incarnated, by someone who belongs to a race the world hasn’t witnessed in almost twenty centuries…
There is something in that single blue eye scrutinising you two, peering at you, through you from the depth of untold time that makes you feel like a butterfly, a steel and silver butterfly pinned by a claw. You can feel your skin growing goosebumps beneath your clothes.
But no. You can’t give up now. Or even listen to fear. There is too much at stake: Rubida in the other room, keeping the light on so that you two can hopefully come back. Soralisa, bandaged and unconscious, waiting for you three to come back.
Master, who expects you to pass through this year and make some friends.
And your family back in the Landing Strip, without a home, without a way to sustain themselves, their hopes hanging on your shoulders like heavy pauldrons.
There is too much at stake.
[cont.]