Cobwebs and filth. That’s how Geela’s books (more accurately, the stolen books of Professor Carl’s) described the void realm. At fourteen, Geela had been rather disappointed by the description. She’d been convinced that the void realm ought to be more regal, more imposing, more harrowing. So convinced had she been, that she’d outright rejected the notion that the void realm resembled a mildly creepy set of tunnels, almost similar to the kind she used to see in her glass ant colony.

But here she was. Standing amid a network of tunnels, composed of cobwebs and filth. The books had been right after all. Geela’s pragmatic side was rather relieved that it hadn’t, in fact, been a hellish void, even if the name suggested it might be. Geela’s theatrical side grudgingly admitted defeat, despite holding out a secret hope that it would be cool.

Truth be told, outside of cobwebs and filth, Geela hadn’t known what to expect. Would she be able to find Darkos? Would she be able to find Noire? There were no handy maps tacked to the side of the ominously pulsing tunnel walls, emblazoned with helpful stars indicating her current location. Even more worrying, Geela didn’t have any helpful maps of dimensional waypoints. The first had been a gift from Carlosi, an old student and disciple of hers, who was exceptionally talented in planes magic, but it only charted waypoints in the mortal plane.

Still, that was a Future Geela problem. The Present Geela problem was finding Darkos. And Present Geela was struggling.

She’d created an apparational form for herself the moment she’d arrived to avoid her soul from getting too ripped apart by the harshness of the surrounding atmosphere, but even in her most sensible garb, simple, form fitting pants and top, void mist still clung to her feet and legs. It was also impossible to sense anything in here, given the prevalence of void magic. Geela felt as though something very tight had been clamped over her ears, projecting silence directly into her head. There would be no artifacts on Darkos to trace, as any artifacts he bore were technically on his body back home.

The more she walked, the more frustration seeped into her. How was finding people this hard? She’d stumbled upon Sinistrina by accident, but every subsequent void spawn had been harder and harder to find. The fact that this made sense did nothing to soothe her temper. Six hours had passed since she’d entered and she was no closer to Darkos than she had been when she first tore into the dining hall, pretending to be a void expert. Of course, the smart thing to do would have been to use Darkos’s belongings on his unconscious body to establish a soul search that she could blast through the void realm. Given she only jumped in a few hours after them, she wouldn’t be too far for it to be effective.

But no. No, instead she had a soul search synced to the damned twins.

Geela stopped dead in her tracks, rendered speechless—no, stupified—by her own stupidity. She had a soul search established on Hari. Hari currently had Darkos prisoner. Good lord were she any dumber, she’d be the one Hari had kidnapped.

Closing her eyes, she summoned her powers to her, fumbling through the loose strings until she gripped her soul search, which she power blasted in all directions. A second later, a ping returned, a remarkably gratifying feeling. She hadn’t, over the past several months, received a single response from her numerous soul searches, and she’d forgotten just how good it felt. Like finally managing to scratch and satisfy an itch that had been plaguing her for half a year.

Of course, having a general direction didn’t help a ton in a world that twisted around itself, with tens of thousands of warped corridors wrapping around each other. According to her search, Hari was above her and to the left.

Now the Darkos thing to do here would be trying to brute force her way through the tunnel walls in his direction. But the other option, continuing to wind through the tunnels, hoping eventually to end up in the same path as them. And that was a stupid thing to do.

The battle between the Darkos thing and the stupid thing was a tough one but ultimately Darkos won out. She would try her luck butting through tunnel walls.

As an apparition, a foolish thing like gravity held no sway over her. She kicked off the ground, rotating so she now stood on what was once the ceiling. Grounded now with Hari below her, she stomped her foot as hard as possible and sank through the tunnel floor.

To call the sensation unpleasant would be comparable to saying Geela was kinda nasty sometime. Or saying Darkos had been miffed with Noire for butchering his village. Or for the occupants of said village telling Geela and Darko they had ‘some explaining to do’ after neutralizing the cult of Noire.

Which is to say, it was highly unpleasant. It felt like what Geela assumed swimming through the goop cooked up by her old boat’s chefs might feel like, minus all the delectable scent and flavor. If you could physically be sopped up by a rotting, three year old sponge, you might be able to relate. Geela remembered once watching a classmate lance an infected sore, and now she quite felt as though she knew what it was like to be both the boil being drained and the puss expelled from it.

It was, in a nutshell, gross.

A noise halfway being a squelch and a voidic screech sounded through the tunnel as Geela was deposited on the other side of the tunnel wall and tumbled to the ground. She gripped her head, not because of any headache, but rather in a futile attempt to stabilize her sudden vertigo. It didn’t help that the walls of the tunnel were still wriggling, squirming around, ensuring the labyrinth of the void was sufficiently irritating to navigate. And as long as the tunnels continued to evolve their shape, Hari’s position would continue to move, both as he walked and as the tunnels shifted.

As if to illustrate this, she shot out her soul search again. The spell returned another ping of Hari’s location, this time slightly closer in terms of how much below her he was but now further to her left. Damned man couldn’t just stand still, could he? Time for a new orientation. Geela suppressed a groan as she stepped sideways, so the wall on her left was now underfoot. Jumping through walls may have sucked but it was better than running.

At least, that was the theory before many hours of falling through ectoreality sludge. She’d just about had it with the revolting wall hopping, but the worst thing wasn’t the actual walls themselves. The worst thing was that she had to keep going. The worst thing was, with each jump, Hari’s location grew steadily, if minutely, closer and closer. She was gaining on him, it was just taking a toll on her. Yes, the corridor skipping was physically unpleasant, but there was a mental component to each wall jump. A degree of focus was needed to keep her from slipping downstream and losing her position altogether. The walls were only as stable as Geela could make them. A single slipup could cause the walls to melt even further, whisk her downstream and away from Hari and Darkos.

Fortunately, Geela never made slip ups. Geela didn’t get tired. Geela never ultimately wore down after hours of exhausting and unpleasant work. Geela was inexhaustible. Geela wasn’t the type to make mistakes. Geela was always perfect.

Geela was many things.

For example, after six hours of wall jumping, Geela was coasting down a river of voidic sludge after making one of those slip ups that literally never happened.

She wasn’t in there for long. Maybe about twelve seconds before she managed to wrench herself out. The trouble was that when she did escape the wall, she didn’t find herself in another tunnel.

Instead, Geela now stood in the midst of a massive cavernous hall. Like much of the void realm, the room didn’t seem to obey the typical laws of physics and gravity. Any surface could seemingly be claimed as the ground. This proved beneficial to the inhabitants of the massive space, who planted numerous structures on all sides of the wall.

Yes, inhabitants. Yes, structures. Apparently the void realm was not such a void after all.

Geela had jumped out of the floor a solid distance away from any of the void beings, thankfully. They were hundreds of feet away, if the void realm could be measured in such archaic terms. The cavern itself was so massive that she could barely make out any features of the ceiling above her, and she desperately longed for her spyglass. The only real way to see what was above her would be to kick off the floor and float for several minutes until the world reoriented itself, and the ceiling became her new ground.

Not something she wanted to try without any idea what the hell was going on here. As far as she’d read, the void realm didn’t really have civilians. They would almost certainly recognize her as not being one of them if she lingered too close, and really, duty mandated that she oughta continue forward in her rescue mission. But curiosity said a peek wouldn’t hurt. And Geela hadn’t felt this curious in decades. She’d actually just about reached the point where she would have been comfortable saying the universe didn’t really posit any serious questions for her to ask anymore. Not that she’d claim omniscience, but she had a working knowledge of almost everything, and anything she didn’t, she didn’t care about.

So it had been quite a while since she’d found something new. Besides, theatrical Geela was still holding out hope that she might find something grand.

A quick soul search ping returned that while Hari was now a bit further away from her, he wasn’t actually as far away as he had been when she’d first arrived. Mistake aside, she’d still made progress. And it would take at least a month for him to reach Noire.

...a little look couldn’t really hurt anyone, right?

For her own comfort more than out of any strategic purpose, she fashioned a cloak around her head. These entities may not even have eyes but it just felt weird to walk in, golden hair gleaming, eyes flashing green. The cloak had a slight magic dampening effect, the best she could do on short notice. It absorbed some traces of her non-void magic, which might give her a bit of extra proximity.

Then she crept forward, keeping her body low to the ground, entire body prepped to slam herself through the void floor if things got dicey. She managed to get within a solid fifty feet of one of the structures before she finally stopped and forced herself to just look.

The structure was a towering contraption that twisted up in a vine-like pattern around what almost looked like a bird. It was no shrieking crow, however, as Geela had expected, but rather appeared to be closer to a dove. The dove was atop a pedestal that ended halfway up the structure. The rest were increasingly complicated vines that eventually blurred into each other and faded into a murky black mist. If it had a true top, it was entirely obscured in the fog. While the vines appeared to be made out of a similar jet black as the void walls, the dove almost looked like clay. The entire structure shifted in front of Geela’s eyes, and it took her a moment to realize the vines were coming from the actual ground itself. Were they plants then?

After a couple more moments of watching, transfixed, she tore her eyes away from the massive structure itself. All around it, she could make out several, small void denizens scurrying around the base of it.

No, not scurrying. Fluttering. From her distance, Geela couldn’t make out a ton but she could see that much. The inhabitants of the massive room were winged, buzzing about and scaling up and down the tower. They were too small for Geela to properly see at her distance. Probably only two feet tall each, max, but there were plenty of them. Hoards.

She needed to see more. The idea that Noire might have actual void creatures in its realm, that wasn’t really something she’d expected, and the chance to be the first to uncover this was too appealing. This could be the discovery of the century. How fantastic would it be to be the one who brought to light the inner workings of the realm of darkness? How delicious would it be to watch the stuffy-eyed, rigid-jawed, upturn-nosed academics of the Celestial City try to explain to future generations how everything they knew about the void, they’d learned from an evil sorceress, who’d been gutsy enough to travel in while they quaked at the very name of the Void Fiend itself.

Technically Geela quaked in fear too, but that would be left from the history books. She’d make sure of it.

At about twenty feet out, she could start to make out specifics of the creatures. Long, pointed, needle-like noses, at least eight limbs, all of which ended in hands. They would occasionally perch with one pair of hands on the tower itself and begin some kind of indiscernible work. Often when this happened, the whole stem they tended to would pulse and shudder. After this happened a few times, Geela’s eyes followed the vine to the ground. Every time the vine pulsed, the ground constricted around the base, which caused the ripples all the way up.

What was going on here? Did this pertain to some dastardly plan of Noire’s? Or was it simply the banal, day-to-day operations of a void denizen? Were they just farming void gunk to bring home to their lovely spouses and children, who would fling their warped, bug-like bodies at their parent and ask if it brought them back any tasty darkness? Did they have cute little homes, decorated with drawings from their own spawn? Vines or birds or whatever the hell this structure was supposed to represent? Or were they just boring drones?

Something about the fact that this structure, and the ones that Geela could make out beyond it, had distinct shapes made her lean towards actual sentience. There just didn’t quite seem a reason that their work would be so intricately designed, almost visually appealing, were it just for the benefit of a chaotic force of nature like Noire.

Behind the sound of buzzing, Geela could make out other noises. A squeaking, chirping almost, followed by a quiet, low chattery noise. At first she’d thought it came from the structure they worked on, but as she’d grown closer, she could follow the sound as it moved from creature to creature. If it truly was communication, then it could definitely hint at sentience.

Sentience in the void. Discovery of new sentient beings. It had happened before, in other realms, but it was so, so rare. This went beyond having a new form of ant named after you. This was potentially ground shattering.

She needed a closer look. Just another second or two of observation, and then she’d be on her way.

The Void Realm didn’t have any twigs or dirt or crunchy leaves for Geela to step upon. Geela was an apparition, so she didn’t have to worry about tripping and falling. She was, at the end of the day, as well equipped for stealth as humanly possible. But unfortunately, she wasn’t dealing with humans.

At ten feet away, all the buzzing insectoid beings froze. Well, ‘froze’ other than the helicoptering of their wings. They semi-froze just as Geela froze, proverbially holding her breath, as if an apparition’s lack of inhaling was going to somehow mask her.

For a moment, she thought it had. For a moment, the bug creatures didn’t move. Then, slowly, just as Geela had considered letting out her breath, they all turned towards her.