Glass orbs, each one glittering with potent ethera, orbited the golden columns, casting everything in azure light. Elijah strode forward, his every muscle rigid with tension. The columns themselves were more than fifty yards wide, and upon closer inspection, seemed to be made of layer after layer of spiraling ribbons of gold. Each of those strips bore evidence of dense engravings.

  But as interesting as the columns were, Elijah was more concerned with the slowly revolving orbs, their orientation patterned after a helix. The glass globes were identical to one another and encased in nets of gold filigree that made them look like expensive Christmas tree ornaments. They were also around twenty feet wide, meaning that there were thousands of them circling the mile-tall columns.

  And there were tens of thousands of columns contained in the chamber.

  In short, the scale of on display left Elijah staring in awe – and that wasn’t even considering the contents of each globe.

  After only a few moments, he reached the first among them and peered inside. The golden net of runic patterns was diffuse enough to give him a good view, and what he saw was more horrifying than awe-inspiring.

  “Is that what I think it is?” asked Benedict, who stood to Elijah’s right. Hu Shui had taken a place at his left.

  “I…I don’t know,” he admitted, unable to give voice to what he saw.

  Inside the globe was a rapidly growing blue mass of flesh. It expanded in the space of a few seconds, becoming a tadpole-like creature that, in turn, grew into a small, blue humanoid. It continued to grow until it reached a height of nearly eight feet – just like the captive djinn they’d seen in the other chambers – before beginning to shrink.

  Over the next thirty seconds, it slowly broke down until there was nothing left suspended within the liquid inside the globe.

  And then, horrifyingly, it started all over again.

  The most troubling moment of the entire cycle was when the creature gained some degree of awareness, only to have it snatched away over the course of a few moments.

  “Birth, life, and death,” Elijah muttered.

  “Time,” added Hu Shui, his voice filled with awe.

  “They’re monsters,” Benedict whispered. “Whoever built this…they’re…they’re monsters.”

  Elijah could not argue with that idea. Nor could he look away from the process. For so long, he’d taken the sense granted by Soul of the Wild for granted, and now, he missed it keenly. Without ethera in the air, he couldn’t feel anything, and even if he could, he suspected that the globe would have blocked his awareness.

  And he desperately wanted to examine what was happening inside.

  Even so, he could intuit a few facts that he found quite interesting. First among them was that the blue creatures were clearly capable of asexual reproduction. That was the only reason any of it was possible. But Elijah was far more intrigued by the fact that, even without the ability to examine the creature more closely, he could tell that each iteration was slightly more developed than the last.

  “It’s evolution,” he said finally.

  “But why?” asked Hu Shui. “Are they growing sacrifices to replace the ones above?”

  Elijah shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?” Benedict asked.

  “It’s too straightforward.”

  “That doesn’t mean it isn’t what’s happening here,” Benedict pointed out. Then, he went on, “Lots of things are straightforward because that’s the only way it makes sense.”

  “Call it a feeling, then,” Elijah said. “An instinct.”

  Even as they discussed the creature and its fate, the djinn continued its cycle of birth and death. For his part, Elijah suspected that the purpose of the time-lapsed incubation chambers was less sinister than raising sacrificial subjects. Given the themes of the other Primal Realms he’d visited – which were mostly framed around each elder race’s fatal mistakes – he believed that the globes were tied to the fall of the djinn.

  He just didn’t know how.

  Elijah asked, “How many of these things do you think there are?”

  “On this level?” asked Hu Shui. Elijah nodded, and after the former astrophysicist did some quick math in his head, he answered, “At least a million.”

  “I think we should destroy them,” Benedict stated.

  “You want to kill a million people?”

  “They aren’t people. They’re lab-grown test-tube aliens that never really had a chance to exist,” Benedict pointed out. “If anything, we’d be putting them out of their misery.”

  “And what if destroying them gains the attention of whoever built this? We can’t fight them here,” Hu Shui reminded him. “Not without ethera.”

  “You think that’s going to change? We’ve been in an energy vacuum for so long that I’ve begun to wonder if we’ll ever escape.”

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  “All this energy is going somewhere,” Elijah said.

  “It’s going here. These time globes take a lot of ethera to maintain,” Hu Shui explained.

  “I don’t think that’s accurate. Not the part about them taking a lot of energy. I can believe that much, but I don’t for a second think this is the end game of whoever built this place,” he explained.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because we’re not fighting yet.”

  Then, he went on to reiterate his assertion that there was a certain rhythm to Primal Realms. They all expressed it differently, but one constant was that they always featured rising stakes and an ultimate battle. It had happened often enough that Elijah had begun to anticipate its arrival.

  And given that he was the only one with any experience in Primal Realms, the others conceded to his appraisal of the situation.

  With that in mind, they spent a few hours examining the incubation globes, but they found nothing else of note. There were no hints as to their origin, and after Elijah spent more than a day sprinting from one end of the chamber to the other, he’d only found more of the same.

  The message was clear – they were meant to continue on.

  So that was what they did, returning to the spiral and once again descending. A little more than a week passed, during which they found more of the same. Nine more chambers, each one populated by incubation orbs revolving around golden columns.

  When confronted with such numbers, each member of the party reacted differently.

  Benedict’s horror only grew more obvious, and his mood continued to worsen with every level. He still wanted to destroy everything, but the other two managed to corral his instincts. Meanwhile, Hu Shui approached it with clinical interest, and if he’d been allowed, he would have spent weeks studying the underlying magic.

  And that was even with his own senses suppressed by the lack of ethera. Elijah wasn’t certain how much the man could learn through simple observation, but the desire was still there all the same. And he was an academic of the highest order. There were no real limits to what that kind of mind could accomplish.

  For his part, Elijah found his own trepidation mounting with every passing day. He could feel the tension climbing. Soon enough, everything would explode. He was certain of it, even if the stagnant atmosphere seemed to suggest otherwise.

  Finally, they reached the end of the incubation levels, only to find themselves confronted by a vast, empty space.

  It was a true vacuum, too. No air. No ethera. Just emptiness. One step was all it took for slow suffocation to begin, though that situation was quickly cured by a simple retreat.

  “I don’t understand,” Hu Shui said, panting to regain the oxygen he’d lost.

  “As an astrophysicist, I’d expect you to understand a vacuum better than anyone else here,” Elijah pointed out.

  “That is not what I meant,” he replied, staring out at the vast chasm of darkness. “There is no barrier. No ethereal bubble. No gradual change. It is a clear line of demarcation. On this side, breathable atmosphere. On that side, nothing. It should not exist.”

  Elijah shrugged. “That’s magic for you.”

  “Magic has rules,” he argued. “It is an observable phenomenon, not some cure-all for things we can’t understand.”

  “Counterpoint – that,” Elijah said, gesturing to the chasm.

  That was clearly not the explanation Hu Shui wanted to hear. Realistically, Elijah could understand the man’s frustration. After all, he was a scientist first and a space-magic ninja second. And for someone who’d spent his entire life on a quest to quantify things that normal people couldn’t understand, being confronted by that same ignorance showed him that he wasn’t as far above them as he clearly wanted to believe.

  Or that was Elijah’s read on it.

  Perhaps he just didn’t like not knowing what was going on.

  By contrast, Benedict remained silent – a common thread since entering the Aureum. In fact, his conversational skills had slowly devolved since they’d arrived in the Primal Realm in the first place. No doubt, he was struggling with the resultant trauma. Or perhaps it reminded him of something from his past. Elijah didn’t know, and Benedict wasn’t telling.

  In any case, there was only one way to proceed – assuming they didn’t want to just leap free of the landing and see what lay at the unseen bottom of the airless cavern. But given the fact that it didn’t seem to follow any of the familiar laws of physics, it was entirely possible that there was no bottom.

  At least there was gravity, though.

  More importantly, the spiral ended in a platform that stretched into a series of nine bridges that went in every direction. Characteristically, those bridges were made entirely of the same gold-and-silver swirling metal, though the construction was a lot more delicate than previous architectural features within the Aureum.

  In fact, it reminded Elijah of lace writ large in metal and entirely unsupported. Instead, it simply hung in the middle of the vacuum. It was a feat that was only possible through magic that none of them could feel.

  “Which way?” Elijah asked.

  “None of this makes sense,” Hu Shui insisted.

  “I don’t think it matters,” Benedict said. “We just need to cross.”

  “To what, though?”

  That only got shrugs. There was no telling what to expect, which seemed to be a running theme of the Aureum. When it was all said and done, it would probably make perfect sense how everything fit together. But for now, Elijah couldn’t figure it out. Neither could Hu Shui or Benedict, and he was comfortable enough to acknowledge that both of them were a lot smarter than him.

  Whatever the case, he agreed with Benedict, and he picked one of the bridges at random. Upon stepping onto it, he was once again subject to the lack of air. Thankfully, with his constitution, he could hold his breath for hours. He just usually didn’t need to.

  Then, an explanation for his outsized discomfort hit him.

  Normally, the reason he didn’t have to deal with lack of oxygen was because the most common situation where it would matter was when he was submerged in some sort of liquid. When that happened, he could rely on his Ring of Aquatic Travel – acquired in his first tower run – or the Shape of the Sea to see him through.

  In this situation, that just wasn’t the case.

  More importantly, the further they went along the bridge, the more Elijah expected something to change. Some enemy to bar their way. For the floor to drop out from beneath their feet. Something. Anything. Each step was fraught with the stress of anticipation.

  Still, he was surprised when he got exactly what he’d expected.

  Invisible blades of ethera manifested on every side, then sliced through the vacuum so quickly that Elijah could scarcely react. He managed to move, but he couldn’t avoid the blades entirely. He used that brief moment to shove both Benedict and Hu Shui back the way they’d come. The blades bit into his sides, slicing easily through his ribs and rupturing his organs. Blood sprayed in every direction as he fell to the surface of the bridge.

  “We need to move back,” he grunted, blood spilling from his mouth as he saw more blades manifest along the bridge. His voice failed to carry through the vacuum, but the other two got the picture all the same. After all, it was obvious that they’d crossed some sort of boundary, beyond which they’d need to deal with those ethereal blades. The choice of safety or being caught in a magical blender was an easy one to make.

  With help from the others, Elijah dragged himself back to the platform, where he collapsed in his own blood, panting from combined exertion and his injuries.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work,” he breathed, closing his eyes as his regeneration went to work. Without access to his healing spells, it would take quite a while for the injuries to mend, but at least they weren’t life threatening. Which could have easily been the case. “You two put your heads together. I’m going to pass out for a while.”

  Then, before they could respond, Elijah succumbed to unconsciousness.

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