The massive chamber trembled. Crimson light bled through the translucent ceiling above, but it felt distant, thinned as if it had passed through layers before it could reach them. Darkness pooled in the room anyway, deep and unnatural, pressing in where it shouldn’t have. As the three friends pushed themselves upright, a metallic, dusty tang hit Mari’s nose, industrial and oily. By instinct, they forced their psionosense back into place. The room resolved in fits and starts, not cleanly, but enough to reveal the lattice of forces holding it together and the dense distortions embedded within.
A clever trick, the Overlord’s voice rippled through their minds.
He was nowhere to be seen. Not above, not behind, not even within the web of psionic architecture they strained to perceive. His presence felt smeared across the room itself, woven into the walls and air. Then, without warning, his signature reappeared, overlapping their own and pressing inward from every direction at once.
Greg swore, and they snapped together on instinct, backs touching, paws drawn close. The space around them tightened. Their bodies compressed inward, joints locking, breath driven from their chests as an invisible force twisted them together. Pain flared, sharp and disorienting, collapsing thought into noise.
The Overlord stepped into view directly in front of them, his massive frame solidifying from the distortion. He stood on a raised platform marked by three overlapping triangles and a nine-point star. Jerro’s stomach tightened at the sight, recognition sparking before he could place why.
“I thought things would be more interesting this time,” he said, his voice carrying both sound and pressure. “It seems that you have remembered nothing.”
The force increased. Mari felt her ribs strain, her spine bowing under the pressure. Her vision blurred, then steadied as her gaze drifted upward despite herself, drawn toward the ceiling. Beyond the fractured slate clouds, the three moons hung low and swollen in the sky. The clouds moved, folding and reshaping with deliberate slowness.
At first, she thought it was another trick. Then she saw the outline take form. The broad muzzle. The incisors. The long fur trailing like mist.
The old marmot’s face emerged from the clouds, calm and impossibly familiar.
The Burrowing Rodent Empire exists within, the voice pressed through the chaos, quieter than the Overlord but far heavier. This vessel carries on. An eternal dig. A burrow with no end.
The words were not new. They were not instructions. They were structure. Intent.
Mari stopped fighting the pressure.
Instead of pushing outward, she let the phrase settle, letting it define her shape the way Jerro had taught her stone should be read, not forced. She felt the Overlord’s hold slip, not break, but lose coherence, like a grip tightened around something that no longer resisted.
The pain vanished.
She could move.
So could Jerro. So could Greg.
Their awareness snapped inward, then outward, collapsing into a single shared frame. No words passed between them. They did not need to. The same voice had touched all three, threading them together—a singular, aligned consciousness.
Mari lifted first, rising gently as Greg and Jerro rotated around her, their positions locking into symmetry without discussion. The shape formed naturally, something Mari recognized from the mosaic and the nested diamond symbol she had seen before. Three diamond anchors circumscribed within a sphere of focused force.
Annihilation.
The Overlord’s expression shifted. Confidence drained from his face, replaced by something sharp and animalistic.
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He turned and gestured toward the massive stone door, space folding around him as it opened. The two guards outside leaned in, startled.
Mari reached out, not with force, but with certainty.
The door slammed shut inches from the Overlord’s grasp.
He turned back toward them slowly, eyes wide now as he took in the formation hovering at the center of the chamber.
“Well,” he said, voice tightening. “Perhaps I was wrong this time.”
He vanished in a flash of distortion and reappeared beside the altar, already reaching for the cube of energy he had drained from the Prince. He pulled it into his grasp and crushed it inward. The cube dissolved into swirling particulate, drawn into his body in a violent surge.
Cracks crawled across his skin as the energy fought for space within him. Blue and red light burst through the fractures, swirling and overtaking his form until the red glow consumed him entirely.
He laughed, the sound tearing through the chamber and reverberating through The Citadel itself.
The Overlord drew power from everywhere at once. From the chamber. From the plane. From the structure beneath their feet. The blast that followed was blinding, so intense it stripped even their shared perception into static.
When the dust settled, half of the chamber was gone.
The sphere was gone.
“Typical,” the Overlord muttered, surveying the destruction with satisfaction.
Above him, the ceiling screamed.
A streak of white-hot energy tore downward, carrying the friends within it. They pierced through the Overlord and the floor beneath him in the same instant, driving straight down through The Citadel’s core. Floor after floor shattered as they cut through the structure without slowing, Jerro holding the geometry steady, Greg timing the descent, Mari anchoring the alignment.
For a single suspended moment, they saw the Overlord’s face again, terror fully unmasked.
Then they were gone.
The impact at The Citadel’s base sent a ripple through The Glorp. A singularity formed where the structure met the ground, metal and stone folding inward as the fortress consumed itself.
The sphere burst upward into the blood-red sky.
Phlip.
The thought formed once, shared and immediate. They did not need to search. They knew exactly where he was.
They struck the containment hall in a controlled crash, the spire tilting violently around them as yellow energy fields flickered and failed. Cells opened one by one.
The formation dissolved, and they hovered apart, separate once more, though the power did not entirely leave them. Blue light flared across their foreheads, forming the crest of three diamonds bound by a circle.
Mari hit the ground running.
Phlip’s field collapsed just as she reached him. He hopped forward and crashed into her chest, licking her face with frantic relief.
“Phlip,” she breathed, burying her face in his fur.
Greg glanced toward the corner cell, searching for the mushroom, but it was gone.
“We need to move,” he said. “The Prince and the furless one.”
Mari nodded, already turning. “Can you get them?”
Jerro grinned, breathless. “Yeah. I think so.”
Greg pointed toward the horizon, where a small white dome stood alone against cracked earth. Mari’s breath caught.
My dream.
“Meet me there,” she said. “Hurry.”
They shot skyward, streaks of blue-white energy cutting through the red sky.
A small voice trembled behind her.
“Awawa?”
The young hyrax stood in the doorway, eyes wide and uncertain.
Mari hesitated only a moment, then waved her over. The hyrax ran to her without hesitation.
She swung up onto Phlip’s back and pulled the hyrax in behind her. “Hold on,” she murmured.
Phlip leapt from the collapsing spire, and Mari poured her power into him. His legs found air. They were flying.
Behind them, The Citadel folded into itself. Birds scattered. Riders fled. None pursued.
They landed at the temple as the dust wave surged closer. The floor split, and the all-season tree rose gently into place, roots gripping the floating land.
Greg and Jerro arrived moments later, burdened but victorious, carrying the Prince and the bare creature, both unconscious and alive.
Mari ushered them aboard just as The Glorp gave way entirely.
The island drifted free into the quiet darkness of space.
Stars filled the void.
Exhaustion claimed them one by one as they lay together beneath the branches of the all-season tree, floating silently onward.
