I was kind of freaking out. The Starpluck Bangle was an S-rank artifact my grandmother had given to Callie. It was SUPPOSED to be basically infallible. Using it would bring you anywhere you had a mark, and Callie had left one on the Acheron. We SHOULD have been safely aboard the ship now. Instead we were sitting on a rocky outcropping overlooking some kind of ancient looking stone city.

  “Where the fuck ARE we?” I demanded. “This isn’t the ship, but it doesn’t look like we’re still in the Shoals. Not based on THAT.” I pointed up at the dome surrounding us.

  Callie grimaced. “I THINK we’re in a Void Shallow. You know how when people spatially expand the real world, it creates a bubble of real space inside the void? A Void Shallow is the opposite. It’s a bubble of expanded void intruding into real space. It’s not…exactly the void. But it’s not NOT the void.”

  I frowned down at the city in the distance. “That’s not actually very comforting. How the hell did we end up here? Isn’t the Bangle supposed to be foolproof?”

  “The Bangle is a method of teleportation,” she said with a shrug. “Spatial powers and teleportation involve the void. This place is in a weird spot in the void, presumably because of the Void Child. Celia taught me a decent amount about the void when I was training with her. Our Abyssal Path takes a lot of inspiration from the void.”

  That explained why she’d been vulnerable to the Void Child’s interference. It also meant we weren’t completely in the dark. “Ok, so…how do we get out? I’m assuming the Bangle won’t work a second time?”

  She shook her head. “We’re not in real space. There’s no anchor for it to grab onto in the void. We need to get out of the shallow, and unfortunately, much like with expanded buildings, we can only do that in one place. The entrance. Aside from the fact that there’s no way it won’t be guarded, I also have no idea where it might be.”

  “Damn,” I cursed quietly. “That’s not ideal. Can you get in touch with my grandmother again? Does the mirror work here?”

  Callie sighed, shaking her head again. “The mirror uses a void frequency formation. It’s the only way we were able to talk through the shield around the dungeon. The Void Shallow is full of void energy, and it creates interference. The mirror can still send and receive, but the signal won’t be able to get out and it’ll pick up clouds of unrecognizable gibberish.”

  Searching the area, I noticed another problem. My eyes widened as I saw Chelsea sitting off to the side with Gabe, a familiar head of dark hair cradled in her lap. “Shit! Bethy!” I scrambled across the plateau we’d found ourselves on to check on my friend, and was relieved to see that she was in decent shape, just unconscious. “What happened?” I asked my sister anxiously.

  Serah and Holly were standing nearby looking concerned, but Chelsea hardly seemed to notice any of the rest of us. “I think her Domain was damaged by…whatever the hell caused this. I couldn’t really pin down what happened, but I felt something.”

  “Me too,” I agreed. “Some kind of ripple behind the space around us.” Glancing over my shoulder, I spotted my wife. “You called it something before she triggered the bracelet, what was it?”

  Callie made her way over to crouch next to Bethy. Abel, Mel, Bella, and Daysia had fallen back to watch worriedly, and they were fanned out around us in a loose circle, providing psychological support and implied protection, even if I had no clue how much good it would do. “It’s called Void Shattering. It’s…if you exert the right kind of pressure on space you can cause it to break. It’s a rare ability and a really dangerous one. Anything spatial is pretty rare, just look at how scary Abel’s spatial lubrication is.

  “Void Shattering is the opposite of Space Shattering. You destroy the void, basically creating a blender of fragmented void on the other side of the spatial barrier.” Her expression was bleak. “It’s extremely dangerous. Trying to teleport through a shattered void is like jumping into a meat grinder. Bethy’s Domain is a kind of altered space, the prototype of a world. Pushing something like that through a fragmented section of void can cause a lot of damage.”

  Grimacing, I knelt down, triggering Sammael and then Zagan. Focusing, I triggered my Life Nova. I heard a trilling cry from nearby, and looked up to find Archie watching from a stone he’d perched on. I blinked in surprise. “You’re out? What about the others?” Chalk, Luggage, Poptarts, and Donuts had all been resting in Bethy’s Domain since we arrived.

  Archie, being a Life Nova Phoenix, was pretty much antithetical to the creepy murder mist we’d been seeing since arrival. While we hadn’t known much of the situation before entering, we were pretty sure he might have a reaction, so Bethy had been housing him. My companion looked as worried as the rest of us, cawing softly as he hopped over to join me. He poked Bethy with a wing, chirping again when she didn’t stir.

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  “I know, bud,” I told him sadly. “It’s not natural, seeing her this quiet. Think you can help me out?” Behind him, I saw Luggage crouching nearby, though the cats appeared to be hiding in Bethy’s shadow. They looked as concerned as my little buddy did.

  Callie’s hand fell on my shoulder. “We both can. But we’ll need Abel. I think there are some void fragments stuck in her Domain. I can…kind of see them? I don’t like how familiar I’m becoming with the void, if I’m being honest. But Abel should be able to help us remove them. Chelsea, you might be needed too.”

  My sister’s head snapped up. “Of course,” she said quickly. “Anything, what do I do?”

  “I’ll use my Abyssal energy to isolate the void fragments,” Callie said as she raised her hands, clouds of darkness gathering around them. “But I don’t work with the void directly, and my Abyssal Path isn’t really void. The energy will taint the Domain. I need you to cleanse the leftover energy while Abel using spatial lubrication to create paths for the fragments to be ejected. Then Shane can use Zagan’s purification abilities to force them out, and they should take the Path of least resistance. Finally, Archie can flood the damaged areas with Life Nova, repairing the injuries as they form.”

  I was a bit worried that it wouldn't work. This Domain wasn’t a soul, or a body, it was a world, or at least the beginning of one. But in some ways, it was also an ability. Bethy’s Domain was integrated with her racial trait, that was how Lark had been able to anchor it. So it WAS a part of her, and I had to hope that was enough.

  “Before we start, let me try something,” I closed my eyes, triggering Dantalion, and then let the information spill into my mind, and through it into the bond with Callie. She was able to share the info with me easily enough, so this operation should be nothing special. With the detailed feedback, at least for the two of us, we could more carefully manage the situation. Callie beamed at me, closing her eyes as she sorted through the incoming details.

  As I sat and watched, I could almost…feel something. A sort of warped space around Bethy. Like a heat distortion in the air. The longer I looked, the clearer it became. But despite staring for a while, I couldn’t see her actual Domain. It was more like I was watching space bleed out. It was deeply disturbing.

  Callie seemed to be able to perceive more. Or rather, she was able to parse the information she was getting more accurately. It just showed me that my forms weren’t invincible. Dantalion could scan an area deeply and dig up lots of minute details, but unless I could understand the information, it wouldn’t really process. Like my mind just ignored it, filtering it out as excess data. This wasn’t a flaw of Dantalion, but a feature, in order to stop me from going insane from microscopic nonsense.

  Callie, however, was able to parse the void energy because of her new Solid Path (and that was worrying me as much as her) and within a minute she had begun, pouring darkness into the heat haze and deep into the Domain to surround the void fragments.

  One by one, we all did our parts. With Callie’s darkness showing us the fragments, Chelsea was easily able to apply her purification to the shards, cleansing the abyssal energy away again and leaving the shards both revealed and safe to handle. Abel, seeing his cue, created a series of paths through the Domain with his spatial lubrication, and I applied Zagan’s purifying fire to the shards themselves.

  Much like a splinter being forced out by a healing wound, the shards were pushed forcefully along the canals he created by the purification power, cleansing the unnatural energy from the wounds. As they were pushed out, Archie flooded the injuries in the Domain with Life Nova energy, and even as I watched the cleaned and prepared Domain space began to knit back together.

  Even with all of us working together, we were forced to take it slow. One shard at a time, infuse, purify, prepare, cleanse, heal. We almost killed her when we did the first one, and only Dantalion allowed Callie to catch the shard before it perforated the spatial vessel we’d prepared and adjust it so it didn’t shred Bethy even further.

  But with that experience and Callie and I directing, we were slowly able to adjust the process. One by one, we cleansed the shards. Some were huge, the size of dinner plates. Some were no bigger than my thumb. They were EVERYWHERE, and the sheer amount of spatial energy bleeding from the Domain had me convinced that Bethy would probably have been dead if she wasn’t a Vampire.

  Somehow, when each shard was removed, her Domain began to suck the bled out energy back up, like it was draining the space away. This actually caused an issue a few times, because the spatial vessels Abel was making would be drained if the shard we were working on was too close to one that hadn’t finished healing yet. But after some trial and error we managed to get them all out.

  Bethy’s face, pinched in an uncharacteristic grimace of quiet pain, smoothed over, and her breathing became more even as we finished. We all slumped down onto the rock and I shut off Dantalion, groaning as I rubbed my temples. “That was rough. She’s ok though, I think. Dantalion isn’t picking up any issues. I think she just needs to rest.”

  Sadly, both Archie and I were drained dry, and neither of us would be able to muster the life energy to supercharge her recovery. I wished Jessie was around, but with my friend out of imminent danger, I could afford to wait. Probably.

  I glanced up across the stone platform to where my friends were waiting with Dezcarta. Bella had gone over to explain things to them while we’d been working, and was still over there catching up with Chess. They looked tired and bruised, but mostly alright, and I was glad their time in the dungeon hadn’t done too much damage.

  “Alright,” I said loudly as I stood up. “Bethy is going to be alright. But she needs to rest. We’ll take shifts on watch, and everyone who was involved in the healing will get first rest. Gabe, Mel, Serah, Holly, you guys will be on first watch. Dezcarta, if you’re willing to help out with this I can use it as a payment for another wish. Everyone else…bust out your sleeping bags. We’re camping here for the night.” It was a sign of how exhausted we all were that no one argued. When we woke up though…we’d need to venture out into that strange alien city.