DAYS FOUR AND FIVE

  The fourth day brought… madness. Acid rain fell intermittently, burning exposed skin and reducing visibility to mere yards.

  Wildlife had gone mad, with normally docile creatures attacking anything that moved while predators cowered in inexplicable terror. The earth itself seemed in open rebellion. Geysers of superheated steam erupted randomly across the landscape, fissures opened without warning, and entire meadows suddenly became quicksand as subterranean water tables shifted.

  "The climax approaches," Mar'Dun observed grimly as they paused briefly to treat the worst of the acid burns.

  Their numbers continued to dwindle. The elderly who had shown remarkable endurance continued to give out in larger numbers. Others, recognizing their own failing strength, deliberately fell back from the main group.

  Each loss was a compound tragedy—not just a loved one gone, but irreplaceable knowledge and wisdom lost. The Drow culture, like most occulted bloodlines, transmitted its deepest secrets mostly through oral tradition. Some elders carried knowledge thousands of years old, preserved within themselves and archives now abandoned.

  By midday of the fourth day, Mar'Dun ordered another brief rest. This time, it was not just for physical recovery but for a grim reassessment of their situation.

  "At our current pace, with our reduced numbers, we cannot all reach Makhonjwa before the inundation," he told his remaining commanders. The truth was brutal but undeniable. "The waters will rise tomorrow. Perhaps the day after at latest."

  "Then we have failed," Ronya said, her voice hollow with exhaustion.

  "No," Mar'Dun countered. "Not yet. Not while any survive to carry our legacy."

  He outlined a new plan. A plan born of desperation but also cold pragmatism. They would divide their remaining forces. The strongest, along with those carrying the most critical knowledge and the few surviving children, would form an advance group that would push ahead as fast as they possibly could. The others would follow as best they could, providing rear protection and sacrificing themselves if necessary to ensure the advance group's passage.

  "I will not order anyone to join the secondary group," Mar'Dun concluded. "This must be voluntary."

  There was no shortage of volunteers. Those who had already accepted their likely death saw an opportunity for that death to have meaning: warriors past their prime but still formidable, scholars whose knowledge overlapped with others, and those without families or whose loved ones had already fallen.

  Among the first volunteers was Lord Verin, whose heroism in the human city had elevated him to legendary status among the survivors.

  "My King," he said, kneeling before Mar'Dun. "Allow me to lead the secondary force. My House has always served as the shield of our people. Let me serve once more."

  Mar'Dun placed a hand on Verin's shoulder. "Your sacrifice will be remembered as long as any Drow draws breath. I swear it upon Mar’Un, Mar’Jin, and O’Shun."

  The forces separated with minimal ceremony—there was no time for proper farewells. The advance group, fewer than two hundred strong, departed first, accelerating to speeds that seemed impossible for beings who had somehow made it this far.

  Verin's secondary force followed at a more sustainable pace.

  Through the remainder of the fourth day and through the night into the fifth, the advance group pushed forward with renewed purpose. The knowledge that others had willingly sacrificed themselves to ensure their survival drove them above and beyond.

  The landscape grew increasingly chaotic. Entire forests had been flattened by freakish windstorms. Lakes boiled. And the ground shuddered continuously with seismic activity that intensified with each passing hour.

  And then, finally, as dawn broke on the fifth day, they saw it—the towering peaks of Makhonjwa, rising in the distance like ancient sentinels. The mountains were still at least a day's journey away at their current pace, but the sight alone infused the exhausted Drow with desperate hope.

  "We can make it," Ronya breathed, her eyes fixed on the distant summits. "We might actually survive!"

  Mar'Dun did not share her optimism aloud, though he allowed his people this moment of hope. His more acute senses detected what the others had not yet noticed—a low rumbling from the south, building slowly but steadily. The inundation had begun.

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  "FULL SPEED AHEAD," he ordered. "NO STOPS! NO DELAYS FOR ANY REASON! IF DEATH KNOCKS, RUN FASTER!"

  They pushed onward, the mountains growing tantalizingly closer with each mile. By nightfall of the fifth day, they could make out individual peaks and snow that didn’t normally cap them despite the unnatural heat affecting lower elevations.

  The rumbling had grown louder, perceptible to all now. And worse, scouts reported devastation behind them—an advancing wall of water, hundreds of feet high, consuming everything in its path. The secondary force under Verin's command had been overtaken entirely.

  "They bought us precious hours," Mar'Dun acknowledged, his voice thick with emotion he rarely displayed. "We will not waste their sacrifice."

  Through the night they pressed on, the roaring of the approaching floodwaters a constant reminder of the doom at their heels. The terrain had grown more difficult. Foothills shifted treacherously underfoot, deep ravines required leaps of tremendous distances, and belts of forest became so dense they had to move through the canopy rather than the undergrowth.

  At this point, their bodies were beyond ruin.

  Each surviving Drow, the 1% of the 1%, existed in a state that defied medical comprehension. Flesh that should have failed days earlier continued functioning only through the terrible synchrony of biological necessity and collective will. Their midnight-blue skin had grown taut across protruding bones, stretched like parchment ready to tear at the slightest impact. Beneath this thinning membrane, muscles had begun to cannibalize themselves.

  Verineia, once the kingdom's premier warrior-turned-dancer, felt her knee tendons slide with each footfall. The sensation was beyond pain. Her nervous system had shut down conventional pain recognition on the second day; what remained was a comprehensive awareness of systematic collapse.

  Her vision had narrowed to a pinprick of focus directly ahead. Peripheral awareness now existed only as abstract data. When she tried to remember her mate's face, she found only a smeared impression, as if her memories themselves were being consumed to maintain essential functions.

  Elder Gleam’In's condition was worse. The inside of his mouth was shredded from four days of teeth-grinding, his gums receded to expose yellowing bone, and his once-brilliant blue eyes had sunken so deeply into their sockets that they resembled twin abysses floating in a desiccated landscape. His thoughts came in disconnected fragments. Between each coherent idea stretched vast expanses of cognitive static. Yet his feet continued moving, driven by some force deeper than conscious control.

  Every surviving Drow experienced their own unique symphony of death and resurrection.

  The young were not spared. Those few children, the Sovereigns, who had survived this long existed in a hallucinatory state beyond exhaustion. Their developing bodies, pushed far past any perceivable limits, had begun prioritizing survival functions over growth. Bone density diminished hourly, and neural connections not essential to immediate survival dissolved to redirect energy resources. Their minds, unable to process the sustained trauma, oscillated between hyper-awareness and dissociative absence—present one moment, gone the next. Yet, incredibly, heroically, they continued at pace.

  But the physical devastation paled against the psychological damage.

  Their consciousnesses were fragmenting. Waking dreams infiltrated reality. Many reported seeing fallen comrades running beside them, offering encouragement or begging them to rest. Others experienced temporal distortions, moments that stretched into subjective hours, or hours compressing into instants. Some had simply disassociated from the present moment altogether.

  Memory became unreliable. Recent events transformed into distant echoes while ancient recollections surfaced with vivid immediacy. Some forgot their own names but could recite poems from childhood with perfect accuracy. Others lost all personal history but retained critical survival knowledge. The mind, desperate to reduce unnecessary functions in these most extreme of states, edited itself ruthlessly, sacrificing identity to preserve motion.

  Social bonds—the foundation of Drow society—underwent their own transformation. Hierarchies flattened. Ancient feuds across Houses dissolved. Lovers passed each other without recognition. Only the most primal connections remained—soul to soul, and warrior to warrior. All other relationships had been stripped away, deemed non-essential by bodies and minds focused solely on keeping pace.

  Language deteriorated as well. Complex communication gave way to grunts, gestures, and single words laden with multiple meanings. The nuanced Drow language, with its various tenses and subtle tonal variations, contracted to its barest functional elements—forward, danger, move, water, pain, persist, stop, endure, die, survive, I can’t, I will.

  Run at all costs.

  Despite this total devastation, one aspect remained intact, perhaps even strengthened by the ordeal: will. Not individual will, but collective determination—a shared resolve that embraced collective continuity. This collective will manifested as a palpable energy, perceived by several elders as a faint golden luminescence that surrounded the moving group like an aurora.

  This was the true state of the Drow on the fifth day: bodies destroyed, minds fractured, and souls stark—yet unified by a will that defied all rational limits. They were, in essence, already dead by any conventional definition. Their continued movement was an impossibility made manifest, a violation of natural law sustained solely by the refusal to accept extinction.

  And so they ran, these beautiful ruins, these walking impossibilities—their very existence a testament to what consciousness could endure when failure meant not just personal death but the end of an entire people and the millennia of knowledge that came with them.

  By dawn of the sixth day, the base of Makhonjwa proper was finally before them. But so too was the leading edge of the inundation.

  But if you know, you know, ya know?) chapters to me, these would be it. Everything I've written means the world and beyond to me, but these chapters just hit different when I was writing them and when I'm reading them:

  -

  02 - I've Witnessed Your Countless Crowns, Your Countless Collars (1st Arc: 777RENEGADES)

  14 - Izanami (1st Arc Finale: 777RENEGADES)

  15b - You Can't Run (2nd Arc: SHADOWxWORK)

  23 - The Blue Flame (2nd Arc: SHADOWxWORK)

  27 - Girlies Just Wanna Vibe (2nd Arc: SHADOWxWORK)

  35 - Are You Afraid of the Light? (2nd Arc Finale: SHADOWxWORK)

  Interlude 1.4 - The Sun God & The Lioness (2.5th Arc Finale: The Shard)

  36(theta) - Justice (3rd Arc Prelude: MONAD444)

  38 - Inheritance (3rd Arc: MONAD444)

  40 - Adapertio (3rd Arc: MONAD444) (!!!)

  41 - A Bloody Storm (3rd Arc: MONAD444)

  45 - Recrowned, The Sun's Apotheosis (3rd Arc: MONAD444)

  45b - The Innocents of War (3rd Arc: MONAD444)

  47 - BURN AWAY ALL IMPURITIES (3rd Arc: MONAD444)

  51 - You Are The Soul Author Of Your Fate (3rd Arc Finale: MONAD444)(EPILOGUE)

  52 - The Fall of Tara (1st Paralogue One-Shot: The Fall of Tara)

  55 - Legacy of Secrets (2nd Paralogue: Durandal Still Glows)

  58 - Portrait of Death and Ressurection (2nd Paralogue Finale: Durandal Still Glows)

  62 - The Flying Ogre (3rd Paralogue: The Elder Wars)

  67 - Cosmic Chess (3rd Paralogue: The Elder Wars)