As disgusting as it was on a surface level, seeing as it was a half-digested slurry of animal flesh and plant matter, Zel didn’t particularly care. All it took to push past the initial stench was a long, long drink of mead elixir.

By the time her hunger vanished, the basin was no emptier, yet the slurry had noticeably lost color - in the end, she hadn’t taken in so much as a speck of the physical matter. It had only taken her body a while to absorb the essentia it needed to make more blood on short notice.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the dungeon…

Strolvath came through the gate, and immediately knew it had taken something from him. What it was that it had taken became obvious on equally short notice - his boot knife was gone, as were both of his backup sparklock pistols. Even his prosthetic leg felt lighter, with the cold-iron stake hidden within it gone.

It hadn’t taken his lute, perhaps because it knew he wouldn’t use it as a bludgeon and that stripping him of it wouldn’t impede his abilities in any meaningful way. He knew what had happened, where he was - a Trial of Solitude, one of the few properly documented trials that people faced in the dungeon, perhaps because it was also one of the few trials that people consistently survived.

It wasn’t meant to kill, or even maim - it was meant to challenge one’s natural abilities as a control test.

Strolvath knew, but not because he’d read it in a book.

In this Aether-rich air, among these walls of black stone, he came alive. It was down here, without the watchful eyes of those he fought alongside, that he had a moment of freedom.

Down here, he could take a breath and unlock the joints of his artificial leg, to walk around the small transit chamber without hobbling.

Down here he could take all the time he needed to recite his prayer to the Dead Gods, out loud, without muddling the Old Ikesian words with modern slang for fear of seeming archaic or betraying his identity.

Strolvath the Musician.

Strolvath the Veteran.

Strolvath the Counter-propagandist.

All three were facets of his identity, but meaningless without the context that he had to withhold from all but a tiny few.

Not even the Provisional Governor knew, despite his attempts to find out through investigations of varying subtlety. The Inquisitor was doubtlessly one of these, despite the Governor’s half-truthful claims that she was one of the last qualified for a mission as dangerous as this.

Strolvath pulled up the leg of his trousers, took off his boot, and cautiously undid the puzzlebox-like mechanism that kept the faux-pegleg cover in place over his prosthetic leg. Its clockwork mechanisms click-clacked to life, cold-iron singing with each tiny movement as he reached between its metal bones and pulled free a small wooden cylinder.

Within this cylindrical puzzlebox, there were several things - a suicide pill chief among them, the original formula for Victory Wash in its purest form. This wasn’t what he needed.

He needed a brownish tablet that stunk like whiskey, which he dropped into his bottle of Vitamax, swirling it about and reciting his prayer while the tablet dissolved. It would turn the elixir into a rancid, leathery-herbal swill, but it would be a swill that would let him invoke Victory Echoes at a lesser intensity and sustain it without burning himself.

Within the puzzlebox, there were also photos, all the size of postage stamps, all taken in full colour despite the expense. Some were of his family, some were of random strangers, some were of people he’d killed, all of the same quality in case someone other than him ever got their hands on the box.

Among these photos was a black-haired man whose skin was a little darker than that of an Ikesian, whose square jaw didn’t quite look like that of a Grekurian, whose hazel eyes glimmered with nostalgia for an era that had yet to come. His implacable visage would’ve stood out, had he ever shown it to the public.

Strolvath gazed into the photograph’s pinhead-sized eyes, hearing the tablet’s sizzle cease as it just about stopped dissolving. With a grimace expectant of the foul taste, he toasted to a dead friend.

“She’ll finish what you started, old friend. I’ll make sure of it,” he murmured to himself, before he closed shut the puzzlebox and put it back inside his clockwork leg. The door glyph lit up and spewed its fog-written spiel whilst Strolvath downed the entire bottle of Vitamax, before he walked right through the glyph-etched door and down the hall. All the while, he continued guzzling down the foul liquid, fighting his gag reflex and feeling the burning sensation slowly spread out from his gut.

The smell of burning wood filled his nostrils as his mustache began to smolder, and in turn, an equally smoldering strength flowed through his body. The door at the other end lit up and opened, and Strolvath was greeted by a long chamber full of agitated locust-men, some crawling out of small hives whilst others stumbled around in confusion, having obviously been plucked by the dungeon’s great machine from elsewhere just to die at his hands. Despite their numbers, they lacked a commander to point him out as a target - the huge ones with beady little eyes were the only ones to charge the moment they caught sight of him.

With a deep chuckle, he reached for his instrument and began strumming out a violent cadence like that of a thousand guns firing in sequence, invoking his incantation of choice in its fullest, “The beasts claim they’ve won… Yet our Victory Echoes.”

With no need to worry about concealing who he was and what he could do, without the need to avoid friendly fire, Strolvath marched into the waiting jaws of death with a flame in his gut and a song on his lips. The dungeon’s black stone trembled beneath his feet, and with each word of his song, with each strum of his lute, more locusts were struck down by his sonic onslaught.

Some fell apart, ripped to pieces by sonic resonance. Others fell where they stood, bile gushing from every orifice as their bodily fluids boiled inside them.