Another creature lunged from the bushes, this time a long, thick tendril tipped with something resembling the maw of a ferocious fish. It snapped at the air with pointed teeth, hungry for flesh, limited only by the arm-thick stem that tethered it to the ground.
In a flash, Warren whirled and struck the fang-filled creature in the mouth. It whimpered and whined, taking off back into the undergrowth like a kicked dog.
“That one likes to take its time eating,” Newt said, elbowing Braiden in the thigh. “Ask me how I know.”
Braiden did not ask.
Augustin shook his head. “We can no longer attribute these environmental oddities to things of this reality. It’s no longer a simple matter of these creatures extruding from the influence of the elements. This has everything to do with the portal.”
“So he’s not all brawn, after all,” Ophidia teased. “The wizard has a lovely brain, too.”
Augustin stuck his chest out, clearly paying more attention to the compliment than the insult. “Why, thank you, friend Ophidia.”
Valefour gestured at the jungle even as he used his sword arm to hack at the brambles. “Think of all this territory as something that started as a weed. Even when inactive, the portal’s influence took root in your reality, growing and growing ever outward.”
“This is the habitat that allows us to exist here at all,” Ophidia continued. “If we stray too far, we’d be as fish leaving the water. Valefour here is built different. He can hold his breath longer, as it were. It’s his physical conditioning, how his body is trained for battle.”
Valefour’s crimson skin reddened even more. “My wife flatters me, but it is the way of things. It is why I venture to the surface in our people’s stead.”
The legends about infernal attacks in the olden days of Aidun often spoke of this, describing the terrestrial encroachment as the spread of demonic corruption. The ground around a demon portal would slowly become fallow, unhallowed, desecrated, ever expanding until the soil itself became permanently salted and scorched.
So the stories had a ring of truth to them, just not at all in the ways that Braiden had expected. The demons needed this strange terrain to actually survive on this side of the portal.
“For some reason,” Newt said, “the chatterboxes aren’t affected by this phenomenon in any way. Still, their use up above is pretty limited, unless we’re looking to raze entire towns with hellfire, which — you know. That’s not really on the agenda.”
Spread out through the jungle, the chatterboxes muttered among themselves in annoyance, yet another dig, perhaps, about Newt’s parentage.
Braiden smirked. “Or when you need to get someone’s attention, or to bring attention to the little blueprint card stuck in someone’s storage room.”
Newt chuckled. “I get it. We owe you a window. Tell you what. We’ll send you some stained glass, special from the artisans of the several hells.”
“Stained with blood?” Bones asked.
“You know it. Provided the portal stays open, that is.”
Braiden hadn’t considered this one little detail. Would the portal slam shut behind the demons again? It felt selfish to feel sorry that he wouldn’t see these people again. It mattered much more that they successfully made it home.
The journey through the jungle took hours longer, with yet more run-ins with the local floriferous fauna, enough that Braiden regretted wishing he could see specimens on this level of the dungeon. The ground seemed to lead downward, as if they were traveling along a barely inclined slope. Just as well: the portal awaited deeper, and deeper they needed to go.
At about the point where the heat of the jungle penetrated Braiden’s skin the deepest, where the humidity made breathing ever harder and pulled the sweat out of his body, the trees finally, mercifully thinned. An end to their hellish trek at last.
Now the land opened into dark, blackened earth, cracked throughout as if parched for rain, glowing red veins traveling in a spiderweb pattern outward to the edge of the jungle. It was clear where the pattern narrowed, radiating like roads from a single point: a pair of massive bronze columns, their ends curved like bending branches, meeting high up to form an archway.
Each of the columns had the dullness of old, worn bronze, like something broken and long forgotten. Braiden realized that the way they bent didn’t remind him of branches, but of candles left in the sun, drooping and discarded.
As they drew nearer, it became easier to see the runes and glyphs inscribed into the bronze in a delicate script, the demonic alphabet intricately etched into the metal.
They stopped several paces away from the portal, and that was when Braiden was forced to take in the sheer enormity of it, nearly as tall as the Lighthouse, as if built for the passage of things much bigger than the demons he’d already met.
“For the ones among us who know how to fly,” Newt explained, pointing at the top of the arch. “That’s why these were built with plenty of clearance.”
“Some of you can fly?” Braiden asked in open wonder.
“Some of us had wings, once,” Ophidia answered, smiling sadly beside him.
Lucie tugged on her trouser leg, looking up at her mother, then at the empty portal. “Do we finally get to go home this time?”
Ophidia knelt and embraced her daughter, her eyes filling with the stillness of someone who had grown too used to disappointing her own offspring.
