Visibility was a joke, a dark orange haze of grit and fire.
Sheba fought the controls, her muscles burning against the drag, but she perceived a sudden, familiar shift in the air, a golden tether snapping onto her.
Idan’s Sacran power reached out like an invisible hand to nudge her flight path away from the worst of the debris.
When a massive, glowing slab of basalt careened through the ash toward her blind side, Idan didn’t just redirect it.
A flash of white-hot divinity lanced out from his silhouette, obliterating the boulder into harmless dust before it could even graze her suit.
Through their neural link, his presence was a bulwark of protection, guiding her through the chaos with a precision that defied the storm.
They touched down on a basaltic mountain peak, the only stable plateau overlooking a valley of fire.
The ground was a living, groaning skin of cooling basalt crust stretched over a sea of liquid flames.
Every few seconds, the surface buckled, sending a fresh tremor through Sheba’s legs that made her stabilizers whine in protest.
The temperature was a crushing, suffocating pressure that got the internal cooling systems of their suits humming at a frantic, high-pitched frequency.
Through the dark tint of her visor, the landscape was a nightmare of obsidian spires and rivers of glowing orange that cut through the soot-blackened plains.
Idan stepped into her line of sight, his silhouette distorted by the shimmering heat waves.
‘Ko’Sawa?he growled into her mind as he reached out his armored hand, clamping onto her shoulder for a brief check-in.
She nodded.All good.
Ahead, Molan was already on the move, his suit’s sensors sweeping the horizon as he scanned for their target through the swirling ash.
The couple followed.
The air was so thick with static and volcanic grit that their comms hissed with constant interference. Leaving them in a world of muffled thuds and the roar of the planet’s internal fury.
Around them, sinuous, silicon-based lifeforms skulked, creatures of translucent stone, skittering across the lava flows, absorbing the thermal energy as sustenance.
Trees of carbon-crystal sprouted from the embers, their branches crystalline and brittle, humming with the vibration of the tectonic core below them.
Target sighted,Molan muttered into their neural shared connection.
Verified?Idan muttered.
Naam. It checks out.
Moments later, the ash clouds cleared as the Sacred Crematorium loomed ahead, a floating Gothic nightmare tethered to the mountain by massive, iron conduits.
Sheba started forgetting to breathe for a second.
Beyond words,she whispered, more to herself as she took in the edifice of soaring spires and ribbed arches, constructed from the bones of a dead space whale.
‘Masks up,’ Molan growled, adjusting the diamond visor over his face. ‘Oxygen is breathable, Sheba.’
Slipping off her helmet and slinging it onto her belt clasp, she slid theDraquis-designed face shields over her head and clicked them into place.
Idan and Molan secured their vizards, too.
In seconds, the trio vanished from the physical spectrum.
They moved across the basalt bridge, appearing as psionic ripples, gliding past the first perimeter of wards.
