The staircase was pitch black, and my footing seemed somewhat unstable. The stairs weren’t made of stone, but wood, and they weren’t the freshest or sturdiest of planks. There was a horrible scent wafting up from the blackness ahead of me as well, and I wondered if perhaps the stench of the tonics above us had simply been created as a masking agent for the odors of rotting corpses and death from below. I was grateful for the cloth covering my nose, though it wasn’t nearly thick enough.

Light began to reach out from behind me as one of my team had taken up the torch and followed me.

“Watch your step,” Hector warned in a hushed tone. “These stairs don’t fill me with confidence.”

I skipped ahead of the light a little more, sacrificing sight for sustained invisibility, but as I reached the end of the stairs, I found myself facing a completely dead end. I knew there had to be more– the scent itself told me as much, but the wall in front of me didn’t seem to have any kind of handle or trigger. Another trapdoor? I sighed heavily and shoved against the stone in what I assumed would be a pointless act.

The wall swung open, shockingly silently and without resistance, causing me to partially stumble into the corridor below.

There was light here, all of it the violet illumination that came from riftslivers, matching the color of the night sky. It wasn’t woven into the walls or contained in stone, wasn’t spread out evenly– no. The light was clumped together in massive shards of pure riftsliver crystals, huge and appearing fresh from the Isarian mines. There were piles of it stacked together in wagons and barrels, gathered in the first of several cells directly in front of me. The hallway into which I had entered extended down to the right, reaching further under the city and into the darkness.

The area looked surprisingly new, ancient stone reinforced freshly with redwood, no doubt the original renovations that had been occurring before the wagons had been hijacked for more nefarious purposes. The cell bars also were made of wood, not metal, though there were iron chains nailed into the walls, positioned in such a way that an adult could be hung from them and unable to touch the floor.

I shivered, wrists aching momentarily from phantom memories.

I turned and stepped around the now open door to see the rest of the dungeon area and nearly instantly froze, drawing my blade.

Riftlings!

In the next cell down the line, there was a large one slumped over on itself in a mass of black shell, its unnatural armor glowing faintly with the power of Rifts.

“Hector, don’t come past the door,” I snapped at him in a hiss. “Be ready to run.”

The torchlight stopped advancing, and I could hear a few distant whispers as the others were no doubt arguing with my command. Hector wouldn’t let them through though, not until I gave the okay– or told him to run.

I slowly approached the cage, looking for any sign of life, any sign of breathing. This wasn’t the only one– the glowing coming from the unnatural dark was coming from nearly every cell, every cage, but none of them were moving or stirring with my approach. Were they dead, somehow?

I peered into the cage.

Nothing. No reaction. They had to be dead; a live Riftling would have been going for my throat by now. Just to be sure, I gently pulsed rift energy around my sword, but there was still no reaction.

Feeling slightly more confident, I reached the blade through the cage bars and poked it– a piece of it slid off the top with shocking ease.

I startled back for a moment before frowning, drawing closer again.

No, not the top half of the Riftling. One of the beings inside of the cage. What I had assumed to be one monster was actually three much smaller beings– far more humanoid in size, stacked on top of one another. All of them dead. I nudged the second one with my sword, and it slid off as well, the corpses surprisingly easy to move due to the solid slipperiness of the carapaces that covered them.

The first two had been slumped over on their stomachs, showing their backs to the world, but the last one was face-up, and my heart dropped into my chest as I looked at it more closely. It wasn’t the face of any kind of mutated animal. It was the face of a human.

The eyes were glowing violet with the rift energy, but there was no life or breath inside of them. I looked closer, and found open wounds, places were organs could have been removed, surgical incisions– this person had helped provide some of the jarred trophies we had found upstairs, I was sure of it. But why?

Disregarding any attempt at subtlety, I yanked open the cell door with brute strength, rift energy flaring around me– it wasn’t as though anyone was going to notice with the amount of energy already flooding through the place. I entered the cell with the corpses and took a closer look at the incisions, even going so far as to pry one back open with a blade, finding it surprisingly clean. This wasn’t done to inflict pain; it was done with a scalpel. It was done with intent. Just for a trophy?

My knife clanged against something, inside of the incision, inside of the corpse.

Making a face, I proceeded to use my knife to leverage open the wound a little bit further to allow my gloved hand to fit inside, rooting around for whatever I had just found. It took a few disgusting seconds, but I was finally able to grip it, pulling it out despite how the blood had dried around it and partially sealed it into the body.

It was covered in blood and gore, but through it all, it was still shining with a faint violet light.

Understanding came in a sudden, horrifying clear wave. They were replacing the organs with riftslivers, massive, pure chunks of them. They were creating monsters, but why? Weren’t the monsters terrorizing the plains enough?

I stood, swallowing down bile, and returned to the staircase, finding my team waiting for me with annoyance written on their faces. “Come on down,” I told them.

“Why is your hand covered in blood?” Raesh asked me with the level of casualness that I had come to expect from her delivery of such questions.

“I stuck it inside a body. You’ll see why in a minute,” I answered grimly, stepping aside to allow them all passage.

“Khane’s legions,” Hector murmured, staring at the bounty of riftslivers. “This is a fortune.”

“That’s what you’re noticing?” Raesh snapped, on edge and obviously more prone to lashing out because of it.

“Right this second? Yeah,” Hector confirmed. “Why is this all here?” he asked me.

“Come and see,” I responded simply.

The cell I had investigated was only the next one down, and it was simple enough to see what I had discovered.

“But why?” Jesne breathed.

“I don’t know,” I responded, and then continued to forge my way further into the darkness.

A couple other cells contained corpses, like the one I had passed, but not an abundance of them– many were covered in blood and shards of riftslivers, but empty.

“This is why they were burning the corpses,” Hector noted, looking at the ash marks on some of the stone. “They didn’t want anyone to see what they had done.”

“Fire wouldn’t take care of the carapaces,” I noted. “Some of them must not have transformed as much as others.”

“I thought human Riftlings were impossible,” Jesne said, coming up behind us. “We just die.”

“Well, so did they,” I pointed out.

“But the transformations….”

“Controlled exposure to riftslivers instead of Rifts themselves,” Hector said grimly. “They must have figured it out somehow.”

“Not much point if they only behave like the monsters,” Raesh pointed out, shining the torch that she had taken from Hector into one of the cages, looking down at one of the malformed bodies.

“Lots of point if they can be made to follow any kind of directions,” I said quietly.

“Lots of point if they can maintain any sense of self!”

We all whirled as we came to the end of the hallway, finding ourselves face to face with a ghoulishly smiling Keric Thurien, holding a riftsliver lamp that bathed his face in the faint purple light and made him look like a ghost.

My sword was already drawn, and I pointed it at him immediately. “You did this.”

“I helped,” Keric agreed readily. “These are old failures though. Would you like to see the more successful ones?”

He sounded… excited, and not at all disturbed by the fact that we had all drawn weapons on him.

“Are you armed?” I asked.

“Not unless you count riftslivers,” Keric said easily.

“I do; drop them.”

He shrugged and shook out his jacket, easily dropping a fortune’s worth on the ground without a care. “Would you like to see?” he repeated, that same enthusiasm, that same borderline insanity in his eyes.

“Lead the way,” I agreed, gesturing.

“Leon, what–” Jesne hissed.

“Did you want to fumble our way around the dungeon all day by ourselves?” Raesh cut her off. “We outnumber him. It’s the smart thing to do.”

I wasn’t quite as sure about that as Raesh seemed to be, but I nodded in agreement with her answer anyway. “We’ll be fine.” I followed, the rest trailing behind me.

It turned out to be a very smart thing to let Keric show us to the cells; my unique memory would allow me to find my way back without issue, but the hallways suddenly began to be somewhat labyrinth in nature as he led us through twists and turns to another set of cages.

“Why didn’t you just build these cages next to the other ones?” Hector asked.

“They were working with the already existing structures they had available to them,” Keric shrugged. “The rooms and foundations weren’t suitable for a cellblock in those areas; they were again here. I liked it for the organizational potential. Kept the dead ones over there, the live ones further down. Just in case of escape.”

Despite myself, I felt hope. “Some of them are still alive?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Keric smiled. “The non-compatible ones were already carried out to be burned, but the compatible ones are all back here. Keeping them alive is still causing some difficulties, but we’re improving. The progress is good!”

I gripped my sword a little tighter and watched Hector clench his jaw. There was anger and fear written on all their faces. I was angry too, of course, but curiosity had replaced fear. As horrible as this was, I was innately intrigued, something I’d buried some time ago returning in the night. I didn’t want it back, but it made it a little easier to breathe so far from fresh air, covered in darkness and buried alive. I didn’t turn it away.

“Compatible ones?” I echoed Keric’s words, questioning.

“Some people die at the first controlled exposure, bodies deteriorating like we’d thrown them into an actual Rift,” Keric explained, turning briefly to face me. “We call those ones non-compatible, burn them, and chuck them in the swamp. You found a lot of those.”

“That was a significant amount.”

“Mhm. It’s something like seventy percent of those who haven’t been previously exposed. You can drastically increase the success rate if you expose them to far lower doses over time, but we were grabbing people from the slums with no riftslivers around. Unfortunate. Took us a while to figure out why the compatibility was so low. Friel was persistent though!”

“So Friel started these experiments here. And reported back to you and Dahl?”

Keric nodded and continued leading us into the new line of cells. “Mostly to Dahl, of course, but he doesn’t have the patience for proper experimentation. We came out here because of this.” He swung the lantern around to the first cage, where there was a man hanging from chains on the wall as though from a cross, arms spread.

We all recoiled slightly, but then I took a few steps forward, looking closer.

He hadn’t sprouted a full carapice, but riftslivers themselves in the form of black crystals seemed to be growing out from his skin, covering the entire right side of his body. Upon slightly closer inspection, I realized that he was breathing. “He’s still alive?” 

“For a given definition. He hasn’t been awake or aware in months, but he lives! Not only that, but the fact that he’s growing the crystals has huge implications for the Chantry’s continued farming of them.”

Human soil. “Is that what prompted these experiments? Is Isaria running out of riftslivers?”

“Oh, no, not at all. But the mines at Isaria were experiencing some natural transformations of the miners, not to mention Riftling outbreaks despite there being no actual Rifts anywhere near. Prolonged exposure to raw riftslivers was producing interesting and unexpected results, so some members of the Church took it upon themselves to do some research into the changes.”

“I see,” I responded quietly. “Where are my teammates?”

“Hm? Oh, the new arrivals!” His eyes lit up with glee. “I’d never seen such specimens! It was like they had been consistently exposed to significant Rift radiation for over a year! Something stronger and more concentrated than riftslivers, but not as forceful as an actual Rift. I hadn’t been so excited since I’d arrived! They’re right down here.”

I felt a number of emotions in that moment. Dread. Apprehension. Guilt. It was me they had been exposed to for the last year, my powers, my radiation. I’d made them prime targets and candidates for these horrible experiments in more ways than one. But maybe, if they’d survived, it would be forgivable.

“Complete transformation.” Keric said, pride lining his voice as he lead us to the end of the line.

There were three full Riftlings, sleeping in cages, their breathing rattling their bars– these ones metal, not wood. Lumber wouldn’t have been able to contain them. There was a figure, fully covered in rift crystals, not bound to the wall as the other one had been, but half sitting, half crouched, shaking, crystals sprouting from every part of him. He was trembling, and it created a soft tinkling sound as the many growths bumped against one another. Across from that figure was another Riftling, dead, that one with tinges of red in its fur.

I stood, unwilling to accept what I was seeing.

And then the being covered in crystals spoke, “L–leon?”

I knew that voice. “Tola,” I murmured, and the reality of it all came crashing down on me. The dead one across from him was Jair, and whichever of the other three were the rest of my friends, now fully monsters, comatose in their cages. They were all dead, or as good as dead, having undergone horrific tortures and experiments first. They were all gone.

“Kill. Me,” Tola whispered.

“The crystals do not seem to be a pleasant–” Keric had started talking, but I grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the bars of one of the cages first. He was fortunate it happened to hold the dead Riftling rather than one of the live ones, who had started to stir at the noise.

“Open. The cage,” I snarled.

Keric held up his hands. “Of course, of course. No need for violence.”

I dropped him, and he quickly walked over, fumbling with some keys, and easily unlocked it for me.

The others were behind me; Jesne looked on the brink of tears, and Hector looked murderous, but they were silent as the cage swung open and I walked inside with Tola.

Dead eyes mostly filled with pain looked up at me out of a mutilated face.

“Is there any reversal?”

“How would you reverse it?” Keric asked me in return. “Half his organs are slivers now, sprouting more of their own. The crystals can be harvested– painfully, from what I can tell– but they regrow shockingly quickly from a live subject. Even a dead one produces more.”

“Please,” Tola whispered.

I took a breath and murmured softly, “May the ravens bear you safely to Death’s embrace.” And then I snapped his neck, crystals shattering as he fell to the ground.

Keric made a disapproving noise. “He was a truly fine–”

“Who are the others? Where are they? Which ones are which?” I demanded of him, standing and walking back out of the cell.

Keric shrugged. “This one was a redhead, a girl. She didn’t survive the transformation,” he gestured at the one behind him, the one I had assumed, correctly it seemed, to be Jair. “I don’t remember who these ones were,” he gestured to the three. “We had a few successes before your new arrivals, and we had some failures afterwards.”

“Leon?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin at the quiet, scared, female voice coming from the end of the cell block. I hadn’t quite made it down to the end, stopping when I had seen these horrors. Now I ran.

It was Willow. She was on her knees, clothes dirty, ragged, covered in blood, but she appeared somehow mostly unharmed aside from scrapes and bruises, aside from clearly not having been given much food or water.

I dropped to my knees in front of her cell. “Will?”

“Captain,” she whispered. “I knew…. I knew you’d come back for us.”

I swallowed hard, looking down and then turning back to Keric. “Have you done anything to her? Implanted anything, begun anything?”

“Hm? No, not yet. After the other girl died, I decided to give her more time and exposure, hoping that would increase her odds.”

“Keys,” I snapped. 

Keric threw them at me carelessly.

It took me three tries to find the correct one and open her cage.

She fell into my arms slightly, weak, holding onto me.

I held her back and took a deep, steadying breath. “Hector,” I said, quiet. “Do you know where Angelia’s Herbalist shop is?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“She can help. She will help, regardless of… anything. Will you…?”

“I’ll get her there.”

“How are you going to walk out of–” Jesne began.

“If someone tries to stop me, I’ll make them move,” Hector said in an icy cold voice, hand straying to the shotgun at his waist. He knelt next to me and ever so gently pulled Will into his arms.

“He killed them all,” Will whispered, her eyes still locked on me. “He did things….”

“I know,” I said quietly. “Ehud and Jehu… do you know what happened?”

She shook her head weakly against Hector’s chest. “He took them all out of the room for the surgeries, more than one at a time. I don’t even think it was him that day.”

“There were more?” I turned to Keric. “Who else was doing the surgeries?”

“Friel,” Keric answered easily, “but he left yesterday for Isaria.”

I ground my teeth in frustration briefly.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “They’re dead and I can’t even tell you how.”

I turned back around and gently ran my fingers through her hair, shaking my head. “You have nothing to be sorry for. It’s going to be….” I couldn’t finish the sentence, not even to give her comfort. It was a lie, and the word stuck in my throat. “Hector,” I said softly.

He nodded. “Come on, Will. Let’s get you someplace safe.”

She looked so small in that moment, cradled against Hector’s chest as he stood and began to carry her away from all of this nightmare. So very young.

I took several deep breaths, staring at the cold ground beneath me.

“What are we going to do about this?” Raesh demanded, tactless as always.

I stood, silent, for another short beat. And then I turned and grabbed Keric by the collar again, putting him up against the wall. “What is the point of this? An army? Something else? The Church already has a military; what do they gain by this?”

“Well, an army of Riftlings is an entirely different subject matter, but primarily they gain allies,” Keric once again answered without reticence of hesitation.

I released him, brow furrowing in confusion. “Allies?”

Keric nodded. “The initial experiments just started out of curiosity, scientific interests, after the prisoners working in the mines under Isaria began to undergo strange transformations, the likes of which had never been seen in humans before. But around the same time that all this came to be, something was recovered on the shoreline, east of Isaria. It was some kind of machine, horribly fizzled out and unusable, corrupted with tendrils of Rift energy. But it held a letter, secure inside a metal box, that had been mostly unharmed.

“The letter claimed to be from a land far from and unlike our own– beyond the Rifts at the edge of the world. Serendipitously, it was from an institution that purported itself to be another Church, called the White Church of Vharskuul, whatever that means. The Cardinal of the Chantry called it a hoax, a foolish endeavor, said to burn the letter and move on, but some of the Bishops were… curious. They rigged up a riftsliver automation of our own and sent it back through the Rift with a return letter.

“Low and behold, a week or so later, another drone was returned. They had questions about the nature of the functions of the automation the Chantry had sent, as the Bishops did about theirs, for there were no slivers on their machine. A few exchanges went by, and the Chantry related their experiments with the riftslivers on humans. This White Church was fascinated and similarly related their own unique experiences and experiments. A deal was struck, information for information between the two.

“At this point, the particulars I was given get sketchy. Dahl took over the communications and relationship with this other Church. As I understand it, he also executed some of their experiments and found them… satisfactory. At least, satisfactory enough that he ramped up orders across the cities that contained “Loyalist Bishops”, as he started calling them, wanting more test subjects. Friel was the first one to create a living specimen– though not the kind of full transformation we had been hoping for, that man you saw at the end of the line was Friel’s work. We came here to hopefully work off his process and accelerate things along.”

We all stood in silence for a moment following Keric’s world-breaking account delivered so matter of factly.

“You’re a liar,” Raesh declared, sounding a mixture of confused and disgusted. “What kind of moron would believe that? Another world beyond the Rift? That’s insane.”

It was completely insane. The gods created this world, surrounded it with Rifts; the Rifts were a natural phenomenon that encased the entire plane. Nothing survived inside of them, nothing survived through them. There wasn’t even known to be a “through them”, or “another side”. Some people theorized maybe they were doors, maybe they were portals, but no one could get close enough to know. Some people theorized maybe there was something else outside of our Rift cage, but it wasn’t worth thinking about. Not even the gods could go through the Rifts. The idea that drones could somehow function long enough in that horror to make it to a destination was a brand new idea, not to mention a blasphemous one. Creations of ours could not possibly do what the Fates themselves had declared an impossibility.

But I knew something they didn’t. I knew that I had made a deal with a being from inside a Rift, and I knew that he hadn’t come from here. There were things beyond our worlds, beyond our scope of understanding, and evidently one of those things had decided to reach out and have a conversation– a conversation that had ended in a mass murder, perhaps many.

“He’s not lying,” Jesne said quietly. “He might be mad, but he doesn’t lie.”

Keric smiled. “I’m glad I’ve managed such a reputation with–”

I hit him. It wasn’t really a thought out act, but him smiling and being smug about this “reputation” he’d managed to cultivate of being honest was just beyond despicable after what he’d done. It’d be like me trying to claim I was a good person for the same reason. The idea nearly made me laugh.

Don’t kill him. It was Teris, speaking me for the first time since we’d gotten down here.

Oh, so now you have input.

I helped you find this place, and that’s because he helped me find it first. Don’t kill him. He could be useful in the future.

It was a surprisingly serious and thoughtful statement, something with an eye to the future, no less. Teris didn’t do that much, which probably meant this was important.

I couldn’t really be bothered to care right that moment.

“I don’t think he’s lying either,” I said, still glaring at him. “So let’s assume he’s telling the truth. Is the Chantry still in contact with this White Church?”

“Yes, but less and less. Things seem to be getting a bit strained over there, and, frankly, Dahl hasn’t been in the best of moods.”

“Did Dahl do something to himself on their advice?”

“Yes, but before you ask– I don’t know what. He wasn’t keen on discussing it. I do know that the White Church has a keen interest in defying death, however. That and creating gods,” Keric tacked it on as an afterthought.

About as anti-Turyn a philosophy that one could have, I thought with a hint of wryness. It figured. “Fine.” I looked at him for a long moment.

“Is that all?” Jesne quietly broke the silence.

“What are we going to do about… all of this?” Raesh demanded. “If we leave it–”

“We’re not leaving it,” I said firmly and looked around. “There’s a lot of wood down here. We’ll burn it, all of it.” I looked at the lethargic, probably half-dead Riftlings that might once have been my friends. “All of them.”

“Including this?” Raesh sounded vindictively smug as she gestured at Keric, who, for the first time, seemed to react with some level of alarm to the situation.

“We can’t kill him,” Jesne said, looking at me, eyes pleading. “I know what he’s done is unforgivable, but he is our only witness to the corruption of the Church.”

“Like anything will be done about it regardless!” Raesh snapped and also looked at me. “Just kill him and be done with it. Nothing else will guarantee that he never does this to anyone else ever again.”

“We can’t just kill him!” Jesne repeated. “Ialdi is on our side now. We can hand him to her; she can be trusted–”

“No one can be trusted!” Raseh interrupted, “Nothing in this blasted system of corruption is worth the ground it sits on! He needs to die for what he’s done. The government can’t be trusted to do it; your so-called friends who locked you and your friends up and allowed this to happen cannot be trusted to do it. Only we can. I’ll do it myself it you don’t want the blood–”

“I’ve killed a lot of people, Raesh,” I told her very bluntly. “It’s not his blood I’m worried about.”

Both girls leaned slightly away from me at my straight-forward proclamation.

“He can tell others what he just told us,” Jesne pleaded with me some more. “The Church needs to be….”

“What?” I turned to look at her, challenging her statement. “You don’t even know what the Church “needs to be”. Overthrown? You’re not comfortable with that. Destroyed and brought up again from the ground up? How are you going to pull that off? What’s going to prevent the same exact problems from happening again in another century or two? You don’t know how to fix what you’re trying to fix.” I looked at Raesh. “Killing him is what should happen; I should take off his head right here and right now.”

Leon. Teris’ voice was cautionary, his tone a warning. He had only spoken to me that way once before in our years together, only once. I knew what it meant.

It didn’t stop me last time; you think it will today? I demanded of him. Your boss doesn’t scare me. 

Raesh looked smug; Jesne somewhat devasted.

“You know who else should have died? A lot of people,” I said, suddenly quiet and tired, reversing my position on all fronts. “And, frankly, enough people have today. Jesne, you can take him to the authorities or do whatever you want with him.”

Their expressions reversed in an instant, but I cut them off before they could speak again. “Take him and go,” I snapped at Jesne, who swallowed her words and grabbed his arm to tow him out of there.

“Why did you do that?” Raesh demanded of me.

“I might need him someday.”

“That’s insane. He’s insane. He cannot be trusted! He’ll worm his way out of whatever dungeon–”

“You misunderstand,” I snapped, voice cold. “I don’t think he’s going to stay in any prison, I don’t think he’s going to end up helping Jesne in her hopes of condemning the Church, I don’t think any of those things. I think, specifically, that I might need him someday. Depending on how many things he said were true as opposed to mad, I think I might need him very soon.”

Raesh ground her teeth, clearly irritated with me. “Why would you need him?” she demanded.

“To kill Dahl.”