A scream pierced the air, sending a chill up Elijah’s spine. He whipped around to see a blue-skinned djinn looking around in confusion. A second later, they disappeared, only to be replaced by a group of three that followed the same fate after only a few moments.

  It fit the theme.

  All around, the city was in chaos. Buildings disappeared and reappeared at a moment’s notice, and in various states. Some stood tall and proud, while others had clearly been abandoned for centuries. Still others had been reduced to rubble. Nearby, a djinn was caught in an invisible whirlpool, only to rapidly age. Seeing them slowly crumple as their body gave out, then rotted, was a horrifying sight to behold.

  “What the hell is going on?” Elijah wondered.

  “Time.”

  “What?” asked Benedict, who’d joined them near the remains of the giant automaton.

  “It’s time,” Hu Shui stated. His arm had been scorched down to the bone, though Elijah’s ongoing healing spells had already regrown some of his flesh. Still, it hung limp by his side, evidence of his sacrifice to teleport the cubic core far enough that the resultant explosion hadn’t killed them all.

  But that hadn’t prevented the eruption from sending everything into chaos. Not only did pockets of the city disappear and reappear at a moment’s notice, but much of what was left had been destroyed. It looked like a warzone where the laws of physics had become mere suggestions.

  Never was that clearer than when Elijah saw an entire building floating a few hundred feet above them, inverted so that it seemed to descend from the sky.

  “Those whirlpools. They’re time pockets,” Hu Shui elaborated.

  “What does that mean?” asked Elijah.

  “Don’t touch them. They are unpredictable.”

  “Have you seen them before?”

  He shook his head, saying, “No. But I have read a few guides. Time and space are closely related. I…the djinn made quite the study of both, which is why I wanted to accompany you.”

  “So, you lied?” asked Elijah. Back when they’d met, Hu Shui had claimed that his reasons were rooted in Earth’s collective defense against an unspecified future threat. He’d also established that he had come at the behest of a prophet.

  “No. I told you the truth. Just not the whole truth,” Hu Shui insisted.

  “Sounds like a long way of saying you lied,” Elijah growled.

  “It’s not the time. Did you check your notifications?” asked Benedict.

  Elijah nodded, though he looked again:

  In the distance – perhaps a hundred miles away – stood the same beam of rainbow light that led upward and to the golden sphere in the sky. He also couldn’t ignore the other notification:

  Combined with the fact that the previous countdown no longer existed suggested that, if they died now, it would be permanent. After spending so long – months, in fact – looking at death as nothing more than a reset, that was going to be a difficult adjustment.

  “We need to move,” he said, already shifting into the Shape of the Scourge. “I’ll scout. I’ll mark the way.”

  “I have better senses,” Hu Shui stated.

  “No. You don’t. I’ll be right back.”

  With that, Elijah took off. For the first few minutes, the way was clear, though he didn’t rush. Instead, he focused most of his attention on Soul of the Wild. Hu Shui might’ve been more capable of identifying various flows of ethera, but Elijah didn’t need to know the difference to recognize the dangers before him.

  It wasn’t long before he saw another whirlpool, though in this instance, the blue-skinned djinn furiously attempted to escape the grip of unconstrained time. They activated one spell after another, filling the air with a dizzyingly complex weave of flowing ethera. The whirlpool fought against him, unraveling those threads as quickly as they were created. But the djinn persisted, and for a moment, Elijah thought they were going to escape.

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  He was wrong.

  The woven tapestry of ethereal flows collapsed, disintegrating in an instant. Elijah locked eyes with the djinn a moment before they rapidly aged, turning to dust in only a few moments.

  With a deep breath, Elijah continued on. The djinn inside the Primal Realm weren’t real, but that didn’t rob the moment of meaning. Instead, it filled Elijah with existential dread, formless and incomprehensible. He ignored it, though those tendrils continued to creep into his thoughts, wrapping themselves around his mind until they became a distraction.

  Hastily, he shoved them all into a single leaf, which he forcefully discarded. The remnants remained, growing with every passing moment within that twisted version of the city, but for now, Elijah could concentrate on what was important.

  Armed with renewed focus, he continued on, and in doing so, he saw more of the same. The whirlpools were blessedly rare, but when he did see them, he was always shocked at what he was forced to witness. Because it wasn’t just confined to death. It covered birth as well.

  Watching a djinn grow from an infant – which looked more like a formless tadpole – to an adult, all in the space of thirty seconds was the height of disconcertion. However, making it even more macabre was when the aging reversed. That horrified widening of their eyes as they rapidly lost the years’ worth of development in moments left Elijah shocked to his core.

  A few of the pockets were occupied by multiple djinn as well, which was even worse.

  Elijah endeavored to ignore them – a necessity, considering the shifting nature of the city. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. One moment, the space was empty, and then the next, it might play host to an entire skyscraper. The fluid nature wasn’t limited to those large structures, either. Trees came and went. People as well. Bridges disappeared without warning, and yawning chasms filled with pure ethera threatened to consume anyone who fell into their depths.

  The planet was falling apart.

  Even if he hadn’t visited a similar setting in the Broken Crown, Elijah could have deduced that much. However, this instance was much more catastrophic. The Broken Crown had shattered into hundreds of massive landmasses. But on this planet, the very laws of physics had been sundered.

  That seemed much worse to Elijah.

  It also highlighted a couple of errors in his plan. First of all, scouting was almost entirely pointless. The world shifted too much and too often for him to mark a path through the chaos. And second, it was a very bad idea to sit still for longer than a few moments, lest his companions find themselves on the wrong end of those changes.

  So, it wasn’t long before he returned to the others and shifted back into his human form. After explaining everything, he said, “I think we need to stick together, but we need to move fast.”

  Hu Shui agreed, adding, “This place won’t hold together much longer.”

  Benedict remained silent, though Elijah wasn’t certain if that was due to exhaustion or shock. Probably a little bit of both.

  There was no time to deal with that, though. Without further delay, they set out. As they did so, the situation in the city continued to deteriorate. More than once, they were attacked by automatons – most of which were already damaged – but by that point, they knew how to deal with those enemies. They did so without pause, ripping out their cores and tossing them as far as possible.

  The resultant explosions were lost among the rest of the chaos.

  In addition, they found more than a few people Hu Shui categorized as time-lost djinn. They were uniformly confused, and their response was to attack anyone they saw. In some cases, dealing with them was as easy as ripping them to pieces – like they had with the asharii outside – but some proved to be masters of various forms of magic.

  The only counter was to deploy his Mantle of Authority, though to Elijah’s horror, it wasn’t always effective. Not completely, at least. In those cases, it only gave the trio a brief moment to act. Hu Shui was quite adept at taking advantage of those instants, flashing forward and cutting the djinn to pieces.

  Benedict was practically useless, given that they didn’t have time for him to enact one of his rituals. He also didn’t seem like he was in any mental shape to do so. Instead, he tossed out various curses that helped to cripple their often-confused opponents. It wasn’t necessary, but at least he was doing something.

  Like that, they traversed the city. Once or twice, they nearly fell victim to the environment. Thankfully, they were all well-attuned to their senses, so they were able to avoid each obstacle. Still, the fact that, at any moment, a building might suddenly appear where they were standing left them all very tense.

  And for good reason.

  After all, that wasn’t the worst that could happen, considering they saw a few time whirlpools spontaneously manifest as well. The only saving grace was that each change was heralded by a subtle – but still detectable – surge of ethera. That warning, brief though it was, saved their lives on multiple occasions.

  It took nearly two days of constant travel to reach their destination. Part of that was simple distance and the necessity to take a circuitous route around various obstacles. However, according to Hu Shui, space wasn’t nearly as constant as it should have been. What had initially seemed like a scarce hundred miles might be closer to a thousand.

  “Each step doesn’t cover an entire step,” he’d explained. “It is difficult to put into terms you can understand, but one of my abilities functions on a similar – if opposite – concept. When I use Astral Step, one stride can cover more than a hundred meters.”

  “Like a teleport?” Elijah asked.

  “It’s more like shrinking space,” Hu Shui answered. He shook his head. “Like I said, it’s complicated. I don’t fully understand it myself.”

  Elijah didn’t believe that for a second, but he accepted the man’s explanation. Regardless, the end result was that their journey took a lot longer than it should have. Elijah didn’t dare fly, either, largely because the sky was even more full of obstacles than the ground. In one instance, he saw a djinn subjected to an eternal fall.

  The last thing he wanted was to find himself in that sort of situation. So, they stuck to the ground.

  After the constant loops and the battle against the giant automaton, they were all exhausted. To counter that, Elijah handed out more pastries, but even those weren’t capable of banishing their bone-deep fatigue. They needed rest, and probably a lot of it. But the situation simply wouldn’t allow for it.

  On they went until, at last, they arrived at a domed building at least as large as a professional football stadium. It was entirely symmetrical, and the dome was made of pure silver, etched with various runes, the meaning of which Elijah could never hope to interpret. Otherwise, the plaza surrounding it was populated by a forest of columns supporting hundreds of perfectly faceted crystals. From those crystals flowed beams of multi-colored light that coalesced into a rainbow pillar that stretched from the top of the dome to the sphere hovering above.

  The atmosphere crackled with energy, and it was uncomfortable just traversing the plaza. Oddly, there were no obstacles or oddities barring their way. It was almost as if they’d been invited.

  They entered the domed building via a massive gate flanked by a pair of statues depicting domineering djinn, their hands stretched upward.

  The interior of the domed building was mostly open, though the white floor was crisscrossed with blue tiles that formed an obvious if intricate ritual circle. And at the center was a simple silver platform from which emerged the column of rainbow light leading to a hole in the ceiling.

  “I guess that’s the Godroad,” Elijah muttered. He took a deep breath. “Nothing for it but to give it a go.”

  “As if we have much choice,” Hu Shui added.

  “There is that, I suppose.”

  Then, Elijah stepped forward, ready to take the Godroad.

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