Far below the battle, Enna dashed down the cavernous tunnel as fast as her legs would carry her; she could hear the roar of destruction behind her and hoped it was possible to outrun it. Glancing back, she saw the rushing wave of muddy water and grimaced. Jiann. Gesturing at the wall behind her as she sprinted, she muttered "Katarreo," and the tunnel collapsed behind her, sealing away the flood and plunging her back into pitch blackness. Lifting the blue gem to light her way, she continued on, noting with apprehensive hope that the tunnel was already beginning to slope upwards. With any luck, she'd --

Her breath and wits fell away as she emerged into a stupendous, vaulted empty space; This must be the base of the ziggurat, she thought in awe. There was no light to illuminate the chasmal expanse, but she could feel its dizzying scope and breadth; so vast it was that it took her another few seconds to realize that she was not alone inside it.

The figure which filled the center of the room was not as large as the hideous thing which sprouted from the peak of the pyramid, but it was nevertheless unquestionably brobdingnagian; its shadow-shrouded arms, as thick as tractor-trailers, were pinned in place by huge columns which pierced its glowing flesh and transfixed it into a parody of Atlas's pose, holding up the roof of the chamber like a grotesque architectural sacrifice. She gaped at it for several seconds, staggered by its enormity, before realizing what she was looking at.

Orton's body was shrouded with the full might of his power, as she'd seen it during the fight with Gentry atop the tarn in Lapland; his features were draped in umbral shrouds of darkness, his skin shot through with polychromatic fulminations, and his eyes were luminous magenta flares in the night. And it wasn't just his physical form; instinctively, she grasped that what was imprisoned here was Orton's power itself, his quintessential wizard's puissance given form and physicality to support the structure which connected the thing atop the edifice to the real world. If Orton's power is here, at the base of the pyramid, she reasoned, his mind must be somewhere up above. She glanced around, but could discern no stairs at first; eventually, however, the light from the gem picked out an ascending pattern of levitating panes of force, like sheets of glass hovering in the air. Entranced, she shone the light back and forth over them; they were invisible except when directly in the stone's radiance. She resisted the urge to marvel over them, despite their elegance; I can't faff about in here while Jiann's dying outside. Steeling herself, she planted one foot on the lowest stair and began climbing, somewhat discomfited by the lack of a handrail; guess interdimensional hellpits aren't OSHA-compliant. Instinctively, she fed a trickle of power into her vestibular capabilities; it would suck pretty bad to lose her balance and topple off to her death. The expanse of darkness below seemed to beckon her...

Outside, Jiann spun and flowed, firing off shot after shot at his enemy, but they both knew it was a delaying action at best; Tecahapoatl, though possessed of a body and the ability to feel pain, could not actually be in any way harmed by physical trauma, no matter how grievous. Within the confines of the domain, matter was as the substance of his will; his blasphemous flesh flowed and reformed after each injury, only heightening his rage and wrath.

It took several minutes for the dead god to hit upon the idea of changing its physical form to be less vulnerable to kinetic force; Tecahapoatl was still fairly new to the actual details of incarnation and not terribly conversant with the man-on-the-street experience of corporeal existence. Once the concept had occurred to it, though, it found the execution well within its capabilities and wasted no time putting it into action. Its fleshy, spongy hand grew cancerous bony protuberances as it regenerated; though crude, they serviceably deflected Jiann's bullets as it reached out for him yet again. Jiann grimaced, dropped his revolvers, and rolled up his sleeves. Time for the hard part.

Inside the pyramid, Enna reached the ceiling of the massive chamber only to be confronted with a heavy stone trapdoor; she pushed at it, straining, but found it far too heavy to be lifted with muscles that had heretofore never hoisted anything more heavy than her own bodyweight. She contemplated invoking it upwards, but something told her that that might be a bad idea; no telling what's sitting on top of it, she thought sourly to herself, and even being inside an evil god's personal spank dimension won't save me from Newton's Third Law. Instead, she filled her body with the shadowy energy already abundant around her; the crack between the trapdoor and the ceiling seemed to expand as her form became wispy and caliginous, and she flowed upwards into the next level before reassuming her typical solidity. I sure hope I can do that trick again when I need it, she thought to herself as she glanced around to assess her new situation.

This room was much the same as the previous one, but smaller; it looked to be roughly a hundred yards or so across, and constructed of an entirely different type of stone (not that she had any idea what kind; Enna was no geologist). As before, a gigantic figure dominated the center of the room and held up the ceiling, but this version of Orton was dramatically different; instead of an enormous representation of arcane puissance, he was an old, old man, bent with the weight of more than a hundred years. A long, bedraggled beard adorned an otherwise bald head covered with dozens of liver spots, and rheumy eyes gazed unseeing into the darkness. Where the previous exemplar had supported the massive weight of the floors above it with ease, the aged personification trembled with fatigue and weakness at every instant; it was obvious that the embodiment struggled from one moment to the next only by the virtue of most extravagant expenditure of willpower. Enna stared, poleaxed. Jesus. She spent a moment grappling with the implications of what she was looking at, then fought down her questions; ascending the next staircase, she made her way up to the next floor, quickening her pace as she did so. She had a feeling her time was running out.

Jiann worked the flows of energy surrounding him as he had never done before; he swirled a lash of fire around him, wielded blades of scything air, and struck blows of shattering cold each time Tecahapoatl got close enough to grab him. If the dead god had had any ability to wield magicks of his own, Jiann would surely have perished long ago; but it could only control the substance of the material realm, and was nearly insensate with the intoxication of physical existence besides. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice, he thought to himself humorlessly. However, each attack cost him a larger and larger share of his dwindling power reserves, and the vestige built new and more resilient defenses into its physical form with each regeneration from the previous clash.

Jiann stomped downwards, and a chunk of earth rocketed up in response from underneath the water; twirling, he kicked it with thunderous force into Tecahapoatl's face. "Got that one from a kid's cartoon!" he roared, waving his fists at his titanic enemy as it reeled. "Ya think I should conjure up a rubber ducky to humiliate ya with next?!"

The vestige bellowed, inarticulate with rage; its desire to crush Jiann consumed it far past the point of intelligible speech. It hammered its massive fists down nearby, rocking the earth, and Jiann nearly fell into the water; it was only with a herculean effort and the most desperate of arm-windmilling that he managed to remain upright. Too late, he realized it had been a distraction; before he could move, the massive fist closed about him and squeezed.

Enna emerged into the third chamber, morbidly curious about what she would see next. I guess it'll be Orton's knowledge, or something. King of the meta-nerds, maybe? Wonder if there's even a pair of glasses big enough to --

She jerked to a halt, horrified. The chamber was half the size of the previous one, and the eidolon of Orton which supported it was nearing human size, now; she guessed it was maybe twelve feet tall at most. But it was unlike any other version of him she had ever seen, and the sight of it shocked her to the quick. Jesus Christ. What is this?

The figure supporting the ceiling wore a black trenchcoat, as Orton always had, but this one seemed darker than black; it hung straight down, as though it were made from lead rather than cloth, from the figure's emaciated limbs. Its head was shaven, a stark contrast to Orton's typical mop of russet-colored hair, and its teeth were sharp and pointed, like a shark's. But the most startling contrast of all were the eyes; blood-red and glowing, they stared pitilessly out of a cruel, heartless face which glared down at her with an expression of utter disdain. She quailed before it; the vicious hatred which poured out of it was enough to make her heart falter.

And yet, underneath the vicious detestation, she sensed other emotions: pain, grief, sorrow. The malevolent face, though untouched by any lines of age, bore the unmistakable marks of suffering and abandonment. She gaped, awed and transfixed, for too long; she would never know how much time had passed. She might have stared forever, had not a flicker of motion caught her eye. This layer of the ziggurat, unlike the previous ones, had windows, and she glanced over just in time to see a great pustule-covered claw close around Jiann and crush him like a bundle of rotten twigs.