"Are the engines going to survive?" Felix asked.

"They're strained, and the cores you filled are nearly empty, but we're still in the air." Beef wiped his hands on a rag, though it did little to remove the greasy liquid from his fur. "My Shipwright Skill is solid, but the engine stuff is too much for me. Elowen's down there trying to figure it out."

"I'll help," Wendell offered.

Beef and the Lizard slipped down into the guts of the ship, and Felix surveyed his crew. The Legion was still out and about, armed and wary. Several Talons marshaled by the orbs set into the gunwales, ready to fire on any enemies that approached them. Witches were among them, standing with their crooked staves and painted skull artifacts, ready to hurl curses at any moment. The Frost Giant Warriors were positioned near the back, shielding the Legionnaire currently manning the helm.

Since they passed through the rift, there had been more than a few airborne attacks, and nearly every one of them had aimed for crucial portions of the Manaship. Strange as it seemed, the creatures seemed to understand how the ship worked; the ill-formed monsters didn’t seem any less mindless than the rest, but like the glitching Eels before, these creatures were…wrong. Part bat and part armadillo, the armored monstrosities trailed a prismatic gleam from their wings. The unstable nature of it had wrecked their shields soon after returning, and they had proceeded to drop in flocks of four or five, each one the size of a car, to dive bomb their deck. The Risi and Legion had killed them all before any significant damage was done to the ship, but they were on borrowed time.

It was quiet now, but it wouldn’t last. Violence stirred on the breeze, and the strains of unnatural tension dance across Felix’s Affinity like a scream in the night.

The deck shuddered beneath him, but Felix barely noticed. It had become a frequent occurrence now that they sailed through the Cognitive Realm once more—the Territorial instability had only grown stronger and the ship struggled to keep them afloat. That was why Beef and the others were so worried about the engines.

There had been some damage from the Desolation, the Whale maw, and from Felix's own Fiendstone shapings. The hull had been patched up with chitin, and the masts repaired, but they were down two sails and flying slower because of it. Beside him, the mast Beef had repaired was creaking upsettingly.

Felix laid a hand against the rough cylinder considering, not for the first time, ripping it down and trying to build it anew. The problem was, Beef knew more about building a ship than he did. So Felix instead walked to the railing between two Talons of his soldiers. He nodded at them absently, and they stiffened in place before he gestured for them to relax. He wasn't there for them.

He looked out over the Territory. They were a few miles outside of the city according to his map, and the clouds had thickened into a bulbous shroud across the sky, but wasn’t too different from the outskirts. The terrain, however, was unrecognizable. Before, it had been fields upon fields of farmland, with small walled towns dotting the wide vista.

Now it looked like a hellscape.

It didn’t flow like an ocean in a storm as it had in the outskirts—instead, it had been frozen into monolithic waves. They crested upward, rock and soil hurled upward into curving mountain ranges that resembled nothing so much as tidal waves. They crested outward, away from the center, each tall enough to pierce the black clouds.

They navigated between them, flying through crumbling peaks that had spread like ripples in a pond. At their bases, the ground was split asunder, so much worse than where they’d exited the rift. Crimson and orange shone in rivers of broken earth, casting deep flourishes against the sky. The rivers were deep chasms, filled with a molten light. It wasn’t magma—at least, not only magma—but an unstable Mana that shimmered through a thousand hues as it funneled outward from the center.

"Sir," a Fist Legionnaire next to him pointed. "I see it."

The ship crested over a final peak, and Felix gripped the railing, heedless of the cracks that spread beneath his fingers. "Jesus Christ."

A hole, at least a half-mile deep, scarred the earth. A crater was torn into the place where Amaranth once stood. Chunks of glowing, gleaming stone were everywhere. Not masonry—there was not a single piece of the city that remained. Its mighty walls, thoroughfares, and the Shining Palace itself were gone. Obliterated. Instead, pieces of the moon, some the size of city blocks, stabbed into the earth at wild angles all around the crater. The enormous prison of the goddess Noctis had exploded upon impact.

The ship shuddered and shook as it drew nearer. The Legion gathered closer to the railing as his friends ran up from below. Gasps of dismay, horror, and awe filtered through the ship. Felix put them all from his Mind as he stared down into a vast abscess that bubbled with a deep riot of Mana. So powerful, it should have been solid crystal, save for the instability that suffused its depths. Those rose and fell as if the liquid was breathing, and pulses of glitching reality spat in random directions. It cut through the earth, opening up fresh wounds where it traveled, causing pieces of the crater's lip to collapse inward in great clouds of dirt.

"That's nearly as bad as the Desolation," Archie said.

"We don't have to go in there, do we?" Kevin licked his lips. "I mean, I will. I'm not afraid or anything. It's just, we don't have to…right?"

Felix didn't bother to answer that.

The ship shuddered, dropping a foot and jolting all of them aboard as the sails went slack and billowed by turns. “The instability is strongest here, at the point of impact,” Elowen said. “I’m unsure how much closer we can go without risking the ship.”

Felix grunted. “Find us a place to land.”

The chasms that covered the land had gone dull, no longer filled with glimmers of prismatic Mana or even magma. Now they were inundated with shadows deeper than dark. Felix could recognize the Void pressing against the skin of the world, and from the way Ondine hugged her wings close to herself, she could feel it too.

The ship dropped again, this time at least twenty feet, launching several of the Legionnaires into the air before they slammed onto the deck, or were caught by their fellows.

"Everyone, secure your safety lines," Loquis commanded, and soldiers rushed to obey. "The instability's too much to land, we need to retreat. Form a camp outside those peaks."

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"It's too late for that," Elowen said, seizing the helm. "We’ve pushed too far."

No sooner did the words pass her lips than the ship gave a lurching bump as something internal burst. A bloom of fire spiked out of the side of the hull as the Mana engine whined to a sputtering stop. Sigaldry across half the ship went dark.

"Everyone hold on!" Evie commanded.

Elowen pulled at the wheel, guiding the ship down in a sharp dive. Felix leapt into the air, his weight shoving the hull downward even faster as he shot upward before flaring his connection to the craft.

Adamant Discord!

Lightning lashes seized the front of the ship, pulling it, and Felix hauled back as he held onto the sky itself with his other hand.

The ship slowed, through it strained at Felix’s muscles to hold it steady. His connection to the ship wasn’t as great as he’d hoped, but it was enough. Elowen turned the rudder and eked what power she could from the Mana engines before slipping sideways down across the foot of the upthrust peaks. The hull shattered through broken earth, crashing into outcroppings of high Tier stone that send sparks along the keel as smoke billowed out of their engines. With a deep groaning shriek, the Manaship slid to an inglorious stop against a cresting wave of rock.

Adamant Discord jittered in Felix’s control before it cut out entirely while he was still a hundred feet above the earth. He dropped to the ground, absorbing the fall with a slight bend to his knees and stared at his hands in annoyance.

“I’m not a fan of that,” he muttered before looking up at the innermost mountains around the crater. It rose thousands of feet up from where he stood, towering over him and his ship in the near distance. His people swarmed off of it, already righting the craft from its severe tilted resting place.

A deep resonating crack shook through him…and the peak above crumbled.

Sonata of Dominance!

Hundreds of tons of rock and dirt tumbled from above—an earthen avalanche that headed straight for his people. He seized the Mana of the air, but it twisted in his grip. It didn’t oppose his Will or Intent, it merely squirmed in every direction at once. A portion of the earth split apart, falling to the sides of the ship, but a great deal continued onward.

“Entropic Paradigm!”

A curtain of chitin lifted up, shielding the ship from the avalanche. Legion mages followed suit, those with ice or earth attunements lifting walls and bulwarks to support Beef’s shaping.

They did nothing, however, for the cracks that spread across the ground.

Chasms opened up, hissing like monsters wakened from slumber as gasses escaped the brutalized earth. These, Felix could handle himself.

Sonata of Dominance!

Astrum Ascendence!

Fiendstone spread from him, a creation he had no issue forging even with the unstable Mana around them. It flooded the chasms, filling their emptiness before crisscrossing the earth that was still whole. Sweat beaded down Felix’s neck as pillars of Fiendstone punched into bedrock and beyond, until the land around them was covered in a patchwork of opalescent green, vibrant blue, and glimmering red-gold.

Sonata of Dominance is level 142!

Astrum Ascendence is level 134!

There was a brief spate of calm, but it lasted barely a breath before the howls began.

“What now?” someone shouted from the ship.

Felix pivoted slowly as creatures similar to voidbeasts prowled out of crevasses that littered the cresting peaks. Just like the bat-dilllos, these things were malformed. They were not Harrowings or Tenebrils or any creature Felix had encountered before. These seemed stretched, twisted by the instability in the air. Many of them were wounded, leaking ichor from their limbs even as they charged the ship.

He bared his teeth and let sing Sonata of Dominance again. Fiendstone rose up into walls around the Manaship, rough, razor sharp spikes erupting from their outside edges. It immediately slowed the beasts, killing more than a few.

“Legion! Form ranks!” Loquis called. “Fire!”

Outside the walls, clutches of the voidbeasts exploded, bursting apart in flame, shadow, ice, and stone as the Legion tore them to pieces.

"Careful! Don't upset the ground! Melee units, forward!" Loquis commanded. The Blade, Fist, and Bone Legionnaires rushed forward, eager to comply.

Felix, just outside the attack, slashed through a dozen with a single gesture, and the world flexed, dropping like a cheap amusement park ride. He fell to a knee, clutching at the ground; half soil and half Fiendstone in his claws.

He licked his lips. Desolation or not, everything was unraveling as the Mana of the Territory ran amok. The significance of things in Amaranth were not enough to withstand the utter destruction of what the moonfall had brought.

Felix stood back up. He needed to claim Authority. Pit, have the Chimera hunt for the Seal. We need to find where it's gone.

On it! the Chimera sent back.

The hold of the ship opened, and the Chimera flew outward, many of them mounted by Sylphaen and Korvaan soldiers, but most with Dragoons. Roland rode atop Thalgrym, the massive wyvern that winged from the ship and plowed through those few voidbeasts that dared to stand in their way.

For his part, Felix rose up on a bolt of lightning, hunting for some glimmer of the Seat and Seal. It should be here, where the city was.

It had been located on the top of En’Cridhe, at the center of the Shining Palace…but that place was gone. Felix drew closer on tethers of lightning that flickered within his hands. Bonds were still functional—he could feel them as strong as ever—but it was the Mana that could not hold him so well. Still, it gave him enough vantage to creep toward the edge of the crater, where he could peer into the molten center.

Is it in there? If it was, they were going to have a truly hard time reaching it. The glitches of instability were dangerous and while it moved and acted like the Desolation, Felix would bet that he could survive at least a casual brush with it. Not that he wanted to try, let alone dive into its depths to find the Seal.

Rot And Ruin, the Beast said from within. Do Not Consume That Filth.

"Yeah, you've said that before." Not even the Beast wanted to touch whatever this had become. So what to do? He gritted his teeth, flaring his Perception as best he could.

“Emperor!” Scylla flew by, her white feathers stark against the clouds. "We have found something."

"Show me."

She flew off, Pit behind her, and Felix flared Adamant Discord. As Scylla flew closer to the crater, Felix landed atop his Companion and together they coasted over the edge. Pit wobbled and Scylla faltered, but the both of them pushed through, the Mana rioting beneath their wings.

Then he saw it.

Shattered and leaning so far it was nearly horizontal, it clung to the lip of the crater, hidden from casual view. Beneath it, the land dropped nearly vertically down into the bubbling brew of unstable Mana. Pieces of the structure were held together by the rock sunk around it, chunks of moon that had embedded like teeth at the edge.

The Star of Heaven. En’Cridhe.