The final stretch of the climb felt like a victory lap.

  Oak clambered up the vertical slope like a squirrel, fluid and certain in his movements despite his exhaustion, the tiny church firmly in his sights. It was an imposing rectangle of gray stone and black metal. Harsh lines and brutal surfaces. A long spike of a bell tower jutting out of the top of the building, over the streets below.

  If his luck held, and Ur-Namma had not been mistaken, the fold in space would still be there. Hanging in the empty air, just past the point of the bell tower's roof.

  The mists still followed his progress, but they were silent. Morose even. The indistinct faces watching him from the swirling clouds of fog held disappointed and bored expressions. Ma’aseh Merkavah had had its chance to claim his life, and the city had failed. It had been a close thing, but Oak had overcome his fear of heights and snatched himself free from the jaws of the cobblestones.

  Fuck you, and fuck your ghosts, Ma’aseh Merkavah. I will not lose my grip, and the fold will be there waiting for me. You can be satisfied with the horrors that dwell in your bowels.

  Up and up, Oak climbed, using the outer face of an old warehouse to support his weight. Window sills and doorways made for good places to plant his feet. He advanced quickly, excitement flooding his veins now that his destination was close at hand.

  The holds came easily to him, one after another, and he crossed the last road between himself and the church in record time. The open gates of the churchyard welcomed him, and he dragged himself upwards into the yard, surrounded by a decorative wall of stone. Gnarled, dead trees and dry earth covered the enclosed area.

  Oak had been mistaken, and Creation certainly had a sense of humor. Now that he was close to the church, he could tell it was not a church at all. Or more accurately, it had once been a church, but some enterprising soul had converted it into a temple before the Doom. A temple of Ashmedai.

  A large carving of the Demon adorned the front wall of the temple, over the main doors. A large humanoid form with three heads, armed with a lance. The first head resembled the likeness of a bull, the second like a man and the third like a ram. The tail of a serpent circled down the left leg of Ashmedai.

  Oak was certain the Demon’s human face was grinning at him.

  Ashmedai sure provides for his followers, eh? Oak sighed, and pressed the bridge of his nose with his fingers. Blinding pain radiated from his nose, and he yanked his fingers away, cursing up a storm. He had forgotten the bonemen had broken his nose. Son of a bitch. Whatever. At this point, I will take what I can get and be happy with it.

  Following along the wall seemed like the easiest way to reach the temple, so Oak did precisely that. In no time at all, he was level with the temple, then above it. Flinging himself from one dead, dried up tree to another until, at long last, he dropped down to the outer wall of the temple with an uncoordinated tumble.

  Just the height of the building to go, before the leap of fate. Oak hobbled onwards, biting his teeth together to keep himself from wailing. His right ankle felt like it was hanging on by a thread. The rest of his body felt only slightly better.

  The mists of Ma’aseh Merkavah circled the temple, swallowing it whole. They swirled between his legs, and formed strange, undulating shapes in the deep shadows cast by the few lanterns still working at these heights.

  The faintest creaking of hinges on his right alerted Oak to the danger, and an image formed in his mind. A large window on the side of the church had just opened, and something was crawling through it. The Ears of Amdusias had once again saved his ass.

  The skulking, crawling thing dragged itself on top of the church without a single sound. It was, without a doubt, one of the creepiest things Oak had ever seen. The first thing he noticed was the face. Its facial features were those of a bald man on the cusp of youth. The monster had kind, brown eyes. Giant fangs burst from the unnervingly human mouth, twitching in the air.

  Seems puzzled. I probably disturbed its rest.

  The thing he had woken up with his hobbling gait was a humanoid spider. A human torso stuck out of the place where a spider's face would normally reside. No carapace or chitin covered the monster’s misshapen body. Instead, skin and weeping sores covered its frame, eight legs and all. Those legs ended in hands with unnaturally long and thin fingers.

  The human-spider hybrid locked eyes with Oak, and hissed, fangs clicking against each other.

  “No. Absolutely not. I refuse to engage in any more nonsense.” Oak blasted the giant spider of skin and bone in the face with a torrent of pyrokinetic flame, and flung it down into the city below with a fiery expression of his will.

  He hobbled to the edge and watched it drop, legs wriggling and face aflame, until the brick wall of an apartment building broke the monster’s fall. The sound of it smashing into paste echoed across the districts. The abomination came apart like a sack of rotten fruit, limbs and innards flying in all directions, leaving only a wet smear behind.

  “Good riddance.” Oak spat a glob of spit after the monster and limped away from the edge. Falling to his death by accident at the final stretch wasn’t something he was going to risk.

  Oak hobbled on, skirting around some stained glass windows, and reached the end of the temple’s front wall. The tower waited below. He knelt, and carefully lowered himself down, holding onto the edge where the temple’s roof met the wall. A short drop later, he was on the outer wall of the bell tower.

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  If he was not too late, the fold in space should still hang in the air, past the point of the tower’s roof. Oak rushed forward as fast as he could, urgency giving strength to his tired limbs and pushing back the pain. He had to hurry. For the sake of Geezer and Ur-Namma. For the sake of himself. In that moment, the fate of the continent was the furthest thing from his mind.

  The tower narrowed towards the end. There was still plenty of room for Oak to plant his feet, but walking on that spike of stone stretching over the long fall below made his knees quiver. Once more, he felt the attention of the city keenly. The mists languishing in the emptiness on either side of him whispered their spite to him, calling out like the intercessors of some long-lost horror.

  “You are a footstool of the Demon, a blazing wrath guided to another’s ends.”

  “Yours will be the sorrows and the bile, his will be the bread and wine, the kingdom infernal.”

  “Your dreams are rotten, your plans a delusion. Your tears will fill the oceans and water the earth.”

  “You will drown in your regret, Oak of the North.”

  The tip of Oak’s left boot met the end of the bell tower’s wall. He had made it. As the faces in the mists peered at him with bitter expressions, he took a deep breath and prepared himself for the plunge.

  As the old man used to say, indecision and delay are the parents of failure. Hesitation is death. Get to it, and see it through.

  “Fuck you, Ma’aseh Merkavah, and fuck your portents,” Oak replied. “Your words are wind.”

  Kingdom infernal? Best laid plans falling into ruin? What a joke. He followed the Scourge of Thrones with open eyes. No Gods, no kings. The freedom for all to make their own choices. That was their creed, and he would see it done, no matter the cost.

  The stone in Oak’s pocket fit into his palm like it had been made for this moment. He had carried that piece of rubble with him all the way from the Imperial Library. It was nice to get some use out of it. He chucked the stone at the point where the fold in space should be, hanging in the air right past the end of the bell-tower.

  The stone vanished. He had not been too late.

  Oak rushed forward without delay, ankle screaming for relief, boots slipping and sliding on the roof tiles, and jumped from the tower.

  Air rushed to meet him, and for a single, heart stopping moment he fell, staring at the city spreading below him with wide eyes. The ground was so far away. If he had misjudged his jump, he would have time to curse his luck on the way down.

  Aaaah! By the Corpse in the Highest Heaven, fuck me!

  A boundary broke, and space sundered into maddening vistas of unreality. Something caught Oak by the pit of his stomach and yanked to a direction that he could not describe even if hot irons sought the answer from his lips. Whether the world fell away, or he fell away from the world, one thing was for certain.

  He was getting out of the City of God.

  ***

  “Aaaah!”

  Oak fell, and the world spun around him like he was a spinning top. Trees and earth. Water. Trees. The night sky.

  Impact.

  Cold waters swallowed him, and he fell to the bottom like a rock. Head spinning and lungs screaming for breath, Oak kicked himself off the mud, and swam upwards. He burst through the surface of the water with a shout, gasping for breath, and sent great splashes flying in all directions. Exhausted and shivering from the cold, he swam to shore and collapsed on his back into the grass.

  “Took you long enough, northerner.”

  Oak turned to his right and saw a truly welcome sight. The grinning face of Ur-Namma. The bald and wrinkly elf was standing on the shore of the pond he had just climbed out of, five paces to his right. He was about to reply, when a heavy, barking weight fell on his chest, and he got a mouth full of fur.

  Laughing, and wincing from the way such rough housing pulled at his many clotted and scabbed wounds, Oak pulled Geezer into a hug. The hellhound licked his face like it was a piece of candy, tail wagging with such force it looked like it might come loose.

  Since Oak’s nose was broken, the experience was not particularly pleasant, and he turned his face away to shield himself from further harm.

  “I was starting to wonder whether you would make it.” Ur-Namma skipped a flat stone across the pond with a lazy flick of his wrist. “Glad to see you in one piece.”

  “Glad to see you too.” Oak scratched Geezer behind the ear, relishing his reunion with the dog. “I may have left a tooth behind, and my leg is killing me, but other than that, I have never been better.”

  Ur-Namma tsked. “My friend, you look like shit. Your nose is so swollen it resembles a potato.”

  Oak could not help it. All the stress that had piled on his shoulders during his lonely and desperate escape erupted into a giggling fit, which left him gasping for breath on the wet grass. He almost pissed himself from laughter, such was the depth of his relief.

  Still breathing. Take that, Ma’aseh Merkavah.

  When he finally got himself back under control, he sat up, despite Geezer’s insistence to lick his face clean of grime, and looked at his new surroundings. Behind him stood the gigantic earthen sphere that was the outer shell of Ma’aseh Merkavah.

  In front of him was a plain dotted with copses of trees, bushes, the occasional rock, and green grass as far as the eye could see. Far in the distance, a hare dashed out into the open from a small thicket, and vanished behind a mossy rock.

  He had done it. He had gotten out of the City of God. They all had.

  The open sky spread above him far and wide, stretching out into the horizon. It was dotted with stars, twinkling like tiny candles in the blackness of the void. After the long days spent inside the enclosed sphere, the vastness of the night sky gave Oak a sense of vertigo, but he could not avert his gaze. It had been too long since he had seen the stars.

  Darkness lingered in the west, but in the east a pale light glimmered, growing in strength by the moment.

  A Sunrise. A real sunrise.

  Something wet dripped down Oak’s cheek, and he realized he was crying. He didn’t bother to wipe his tears. There was no need because Geezer's tongue lapped them up. A delicate, thin hand clapped him on the shoulder, and a solemn Ur-Namma sat down next to the two of them. He had not realized the old elf had even moved.

  The sight of the world beyond the sphere had utterly stolen his attention, and stunned him into stupefied silence.

  Together, the three of them watched a new dawn chase the darkness of the night across the sky. There was a lot of work, and many challenges ahead of them, but all of that would keep for the moment.

  It’s good to be alive.

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