In accordance with the ritual secrets, she raised the guidestone fragment, reaching with it forward, while performing the Gesture of the Hollow Spire - known also as the Sign of Closing - with her right hand, keeping it close to her chest. In this manner she approached, with the guidestone’s scrawl swirling above her.

  Time, for once, flowed normally. The walk towards the throne proceeded entirely mundanely, with nary a sound issuing from anywhere as she approached. It wasn’t until she reached the mark of ten pillars from the throne, that she felt a weight descending onto her shoulders. With each step, the pressure grew, and with it, so did the vigor with which the guidestone’s script whirled about, and the intensity of the stone’s thrumming in her hand. By the point of five pillars from the throne, it was a struggle to take a single step, and the stone thrashed in her grip as if it was actively trying to tear itself free.

  “That will be close enough,” came a voice made from the overlaid sum of ten thousand voices, its dissonance reaching a point where it circled back and became a single, coherent voice again — the voice of a man, regal and composed yet stern and harsh in equal measure.

  The Grey Fog rushed in from all sides, washing over Krahe and her surroundings before she could react, taking with it that crushing pressure and even the pillars. The throne room in which she now stood was blank, starkly so, with the only features that remained being the throne alcove and the door through which she had entered. All else was flat, blank, iridescent-black stone, and even its iridescence was faint enough to mistake it for mundane polished granite.

  “Take our test not as an insult; we seek only to be certain that those who seek audience with us will not go mad and cause an undue mess if we show ourselves,” came a second voice. Besides being recognizably female, it had absolutely no characteristics whatsoever, and in fact seemed to change the moment Krahe felt like she was getting close to discerning anything beyond that vaguely female sound, just as the Grey Fog scattered and obscured any shapes within it.

  The curtain rose, and Krahe beheld the rulers of Zor’Aguhastra; the King of Many Colours and the Shadeless Queen. Where the King was so strongly iridescent-black as to look like a window into an infinitely-stacking fractal of incomprehensible depth and colour, the Queen indeed had no colour at all, and was greyer than grey. Where the King possessed a majestic crown floating above his brow, burning eyes, and exquisite robes whose immense detail somehow popped out amidst the incomprehensible colour, the Queen was just a vague figure of a woman in a dress; she even had no face, no face at all. Where the King sat in a spread-out, bombastic pose, nearly floating above his throne, the Queen sat with hands folded in her lap. The King, just as the Wizard had said, cast numerous shadows in all directions, each appearing as the shadow of a different person, while the Queen cast no shadow at all.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  These two were the very opposites of a spectrum, each perfectly embodying the aspects of Zor’Aguhastra they represented. There was a small miracle to their extremity; despite registering as “a mass of iridescent-black” at first glance, the King’s robes all had clear and distinct colours with each passing moment, as if Krahe’s mind was slowly, ever so slowly, coming to interpret those imperial vestments, and in the same way, despite having no detail at all, ever so slowly, the Queen, too, gradually gained the vaguest suggestion of facial features. It felt like an eternity and a moment had passed before her eyes were dragged elsewhere.

  Behind the throne, half-obscured by glimmering mist, Krahe beheld a flash of xanthous colour. Pinned to the wall by wedge-shaped nails that were at once square yet whose heads had five corners, there hung a mass of tatters, to the eyes a brownish-yellow, but wrong somehow. Merely by gazing upon it she knew it to be an evil, wretched thing, and she knew that its colour was an illusion, a representation, a metaphor born from her mind’s attempt to interpret it while also shutting out its corrupting influence. That colour alone was a pus of the soul. The sense of wrongness that it exuded, the sense of rottenness, of madness and sheer evil, were no doubt restrained only by the very nails that pinned it in place. Yet in the same, there was also an unsettling beauty to it; the garment’s weave contained hypnotic patterns, and a mere glimpse of its inner lining whispered of the absolute apex of art. The wall behind it was crisscrossed by cracks and overgrown by strange moss, in stark contrast to the impeccable perfection of every other surface in the throne room. The robe seemed perpetually on the verge of falling apart, pieces constantly tearing away in the astral wind, yet its totality never decreased. It wasn’t permitted to decay. The fluttering of its fabric seemed to almost be the writhing of a prisoner in torment.

  Once more, the royals spoke, drawing her attention from that tattered derelict.

  “Another sent by that snakemouthed madman-thief-destroyer-conqueror. This is not The One whom we have awaited.”

  “What difference does that make? Look upon the traveler. God-eater, the snakemouthed one’s kin, yet unlike him.”

  “She brings with her an eater of carrion, fat with the torment of sinners. This one must dwell only in the darkest places, for such a grievous omen to think her a suitable master. Were you to doff your mask, I suspect your mere presence would turn this chamber into a desert choked with corpses. Why ought we consign one of our own to dwell within you, if your path is likely to end in an ignoble death before the astral tides change but once? You fool, who strides with a dagger into a leviathan’s den, and for what?! Because you believe it evil? Because you believe your death will somehow avenge those the beast has eaten?!”

  “Take my husband not to be malicious. He cares, more than any, for the wellbeing of our kin. The untimely death of a host-contractor spells dire consequences for us. Should one of us be summoned and then cast out of the world of light within too short a span, the loss will far surpass what we gained from communion. Eons of effort and a great number of hosts, wasted. I would bid you to speak, traveler. We would hear of who you are.”

  If you’d like to read ahead, consider heading on over to the ! You get up to 20 advance chapters for both Retribution Engine and Cherno Caster.

  I’d also greatly appreciate it if you could rate my story, maybe even leave a review or advanced review! Advanced reviews count for more in the eyes of the algorithm, so that pretty much means they determine the success of my work.

  For a link to the discord, check the synopsis.