The room beyond was dark and empty with no sign of the manservant despite both guardsman and angel having seen him be pulled into it. He’d just vanished into thin air. To his credit, Guardsman Talver didn’t hesitate to go after the servant. The angel barely had time to take hold of Talver’s tunic. She tried to call out a warning, to pull him back, to stop him from going in but it was too late and she too was pulled into the room by the hasty guardsman.

  “Sir, if you can hear me say something! Damn it all, where is he?” Talver shouted while looking around. Brivaria said nothing. Her heart was beating quickly and as she looked back at the door they’d come through, the mana lamp sitting outside the door still shining with a soft light. A sense of pure dread danced up her spine as she saw it begin to change. The scene of the basement behind them vanished and the room went completely dark.

  “Talver, stop. Don’t move. Do not move unless you want to die,” Brivaria said, immediately lowering her voice until she was whispering at the end. Talver seemed to realize something was very wrong and grew still. Brivaria’s free hand began to glow, bathing the room in light.

  They were standing in the Decrune armory at first glance but Brivaria knew better. They weren’t in the armory. They weren’t in Barton. They weren’t even on Zlithia now. The doorway back the way they came now held a view of a room identical to the one they occupied. It was not a mirror. There was an exact replica of the room they now stood in and she knew that beyond that room was another and another and another.

  “What is this?” Talver asked as though realizing something was horribly wrong, his gaze soon following Brivaria’s to find the way back to the basement stairs gone.

  “Where, not what. This is the Between. You can speak but keep your voice down,” the angel whispered. She swept her light over the room noting it was almost entirely empty. Wooden display cases were empty, wall mounts were empty, and there were no weapons, armor, or other pieces of equipment to be found here. If this was a copy of the real thing then it meant the real Decrune armory was just as empty.

  “What is that and why are we whispering?” the man asked, having the good sense to do as the winged girl requested.

  “Imagine your world and everything around it is like a house. Now imagine a bunch of those houses. We are currently between those houses. Once upon a time people used to believe the Between was a mirror world, constantly shifting in response to whatever world or reality it bordered. My people tried to explore it long ago under that assumption. We were wrong.” While she spoke, Brivaria’s hand moved from Talver’s coat. Her free hand found one of his. She laced their fingers together and gripped his hand tightly with her own.

  “It is a nightmarish intersection of all realities, all universes, all planets. There are monsters here far more terrifying than anything that exists on Zlithia. From nascent gods to slumbering horrors that should never stir, the Between holds unimaginable danger for not just one planet but all of them. Once my people realized how dangerous our forays truly were, we ended them. Now we try to fight off its deformed inhabitants and mend the rifts wherever possible.”

  The angel held onto Talver with one hand while using the other to open a second door from the room. She stood to the side, anticipating an attack but none came. Peering through the second exit, she saw another armory. These rooms could go on forever. People had died in rooms like these, wandering endlessly until they starved to death. They could die this way.

  “Where did the manservant go? We went right after him.” Talver was peering into the new room while he spoke. His brows knit together as he beheld yet another copy of the room they now seemed to stand in.

  “All doors and openings are portals. If you were to step through this door then I’d probably never see you again,” Brivaria explained, gesturing to the door as she did so. “The only way to remain together is to be touching. The Between shifts constantly even if we can’t see it. The only time it will refuse to shift is when someone is in a portal or a group of people are touching one another. It won’t close the portal on them for the same reason it won’t close on you mid-step through it.”

  “Ah, so we hold hands or end up lost forever.” Talver was starting to pale as the words sank in.

  “Those aren’t mutually exclusive but yes,” Brivaria said darkly.

  “Alright, what’s the plan, boss?” Talver asked with a smile that surprised Brivaria. She gave him an odd look and he shrugged. “You seem to know what you’re about and I don’t. I’ll follow your lead.”

  He was more cheerful about the situation than Brivaria expected but some people were like that. Some reacted to stress with anger and fear. Some hyper-focused on solving the problem. Some focused on what they could do versus what they couldn’t. The winged girl suspected Talver was the latter and she was thankful for it.

  “The space shifts but that connection to Barton still exists. We just have to find it and I think you can do it. Can you focus on your Sense of Direction trait?” She saw realization on his face and he nodded. He turned and pointed at the far door in the back of the room.

  “I’m feeling the tug in that direction. We go that way?” At Brivaria’s nod, he began moving. Sense of Direction was a fairly low value trait compared to Sadistic Glee or Demon Hide but it was invaluable in times like these. Brivaria could shift to her dark-haired human form to get it had she been alone or gotten separated from Talver but this was vastly preferable.

  “I’m going to change forms. I don’t have functional armor right now and if something attacks us then I’d like some physical protection. Don’t be alarmed.” She spent the mana to change to her demon form. Since gaining Corrupt Shapeshifting, the cost had gone down drastically. That was good since her 166 mana was going to have to last however long they were here.

  “Change forms, what does that mea…” Talver stopped when he saw that he was now holding hands with a demon. “Whoa, okay, good warning.”

  They opened the door to find an identical copy of the room they were in and entered it. The next door offered the same and so did the door after that. Talver’s cheerful expression seemed frozen on his face thanks to an act of supreme willpower. Brivaria didn’t want to say anything to further stress the man. Instead, she focused on sweeping the rooms with her demonic eyesight. She kept the light on for Talver’s sake but her eyes pierced the gloom and her prey sense let her see things that hid in the shadows. That was how she noticed the monster before it snuck up on them.

  She’d already fought Ogramites recently. The large and many limbed creatures that crawled into armor could be anywhere from clumsy, shambling horrors to lethal killing machines. These were the former. Even if the Ogramite had gotten the drop on her, the wide swing would have given her an eternity to dodge it. The fact that she saw it coming well ahead of time meant Brivaria was able to step in the long, noodle-like arm’s swing then jam her claws straight into its chest. The demonic talons pierced the metal and came away wet with whatever passed for the creature’s blood as she pulled them out.

  “Whoa! Hell, those again?” Talver all but shouted in surprise. Brivaria cursed inwardly. Drawn to the sound, more Ogramites began to rise in the room. Worse, more still came from one of the room’s entrances. That was the thing about creatures in the Between. It wasn’t that they had excellent hearing, exactly, but rather that noise attracted them. Fighting created more noise which attracted more monsters. Those unlucky enough to find themselves in the Between would eventually be drowned in a never-ending horde.

  “Shh,” Brivaria said while infusing both claws and her tail with withering magic. “Fight quietly. Aim for the openings in their armor or their worm-like limbs.”

  Another Ogramite swung at the angel-turned-demon. One swing of her claws cut off its arm and another pierced its chest. These Ogramites were weak because their armor was weak. It was soft and unenchanted. Her claws could easily cut through it and her withering infusion would ensure anything she cut would die.

  As if sensing their peril, the Ogramites began fighting desperately with wide, flailing strikes. These forced the winged girl to use her stamina to dodge. It was inefficient but it did let her see that some of the swords were enchanted. The sword of one Ogramite bit into the metal chest piece of another. She cut off the arm, grabbed the sword, and rammed it into the chest of its former owner.

  Another swung at Brivaria and she ducked, cut through its leg with one claw, and then kicked it when it hit the ground. The razor-sharp talons on her feet began to glow with dark light as they were infused with magic just before stabbing into the downed monster. Two kicks and it stopped moving. Brivaria grinned at her handiwork and moved to the next one.

  Her eyes twinkled with delight as she moved from one Ogramite to the next, hacking them apart with ease. Neither their flesh nor their armor protected them from her natural weapons. One Ogramite barreled into her and she simply clung to it while her tail swung down under and then upward, impaling it from below again and again until it stopped moving. It had been a long time since the winged girl had a fight that was so clearly and obviously tilted in her favor. She reveled in it.

  Her mind started to wander as she fought. She noticed the swords that were enchanted and the ones that were not. The former went into her inventory though they were few and far between. She also began to wonder how many pieces she could cut off before one died. That would be a fun experiment. She had only had a few left so she should have fun with the ones remaining before they were all gone.

  The dark joy fell away when she heard Talver grunt in pain. Brivaria’s black eyes turned and that’s when she saw the guardsman fighting desperately against three Ogramites. Two were dead and he’d managed to get one of the enchanted blades but he’d taken a deep cut to the side and was being backed into a corner by the other three. He was a guardsman. His skills made him powerful in his city but not here. In this place he was weaker than Nyx and she’d charged into the fray leaving him alone.

  A single flap of her bat-like wings hurled Brivaria across the room. She landed on the back of one of the three Ogramites fighting Talver and dug both her claws into it while her tail stabbed into it from below. The force from the impact drove the monster past Talver and into a display case with a loud crash. She turned her head and saw a blade arcing down toward Talver and activated Wind Formation. A small barrier of wind appeared in the middle of the noodle-like appendage which caused it to curl inward and accidentally drive the sword into its companion. That brief distraction was all the pair needed. Brivaria went for one with her claws and Talver drove his borrowed blade into the chest of the other.

  “We need to get out of this room. Which way?” the winged girl hissed. More were on her heels but the noise from the crash and splintering display case would almost certainly draw something more dangerous than these things. They had to get out before then.

  “There,” Talver pointed, using his inside voice despite the situation.

  “Go,” the angel commanded. Her claws receded into fingers and she grabbed his arm. They ran for the door with the last several armored monsters behind them. As soon as they were through the door, the world changed. It had looked like they were jumping through the doorway and into another copy of the same armory room. What greeted them beyond the portal was anything but.

  They were no longer indoors but outside. An orange sky yawned before them without a single cloud. An aura of gloom bathed the entire area as the whole landscape appeared to be in the middle of a perpetual eclipse. A black orb in the sky was wreathed in light. Of all the things they saw in the moment, the thing that was by far the most disturbing element of the strange landscape was what they were standing on. It was the spine of a long dead creature that emerged from the flat, stone wall of a mountain to curve down and around. Every single bone in the massive skeleton was the size of the Decrune mansion. It took only seconds after they arrived for something to notice them.