Thick clouds of pale haze spilled into the open cavern that had previously been hidden beneath the pillar. Seeking the lowest point, the oppressive cloudiness parted momentarily around the divided group. As the quarry-like opening slowly filled, Henry engaged in a tense staring contest with the man who had successfully usurped authority of the entire expedition.

  Truthfully, he felt like he was losing that standoff. Gordon was both literally and figuratively looking down on him. Wrist tilted forward so that the revolver angled down to point directly between his eyes, with a focused expression directly behind it that betrayed no sense of remorse.

  Cold, calculating. Staring at Henry like his life was less valuable than the bullet he’d need to use to finish him off.

  As good as Henry might’ve been at passing off certain emotions for others, he still was one to wear his feelings on his sleeve. He never understood how people got into the habit of building a full-on wall between what they felt and what he saw of them. The few times he had tried it himself, he’d ended up being read like an open book even more than if he’d used his own tried and true methods.

  Not that that didn’t lead to a handful of occasions where how he felt was plainly obvious for all to see. Right now, as he crouched low protectively in front of Layla, hands on her shoulders tight to keep her head out of the line of fire while he peered over his own to return Gordon’s gaze… he felt weak. Cornered. Between a rock and a hard place, or any number of similar descriptors.

  It didn’t help that his duplicate’s lifeless body was cooling off mere inches away from him. As the seconds dragged on, he kept feeling his eyes gravitate closer towards the mangled mess that was all that remained of its mouth.

  Bone shards and cracked teeth littered the cadaver’s head. An eye had popped loose from overpressure, dangling loose from its socket but still barely attached. Even now, it still let off an occasional spasm, blood and some decidedly not-blood-but-probably-still-important liquid pooling from the open wound.

  His own gunshot seemed downright unimportant in comparison, despite the steady trickle seeping from his arm that he really get around to staunching sooner rather than later.

  …It would have to wait. Until Gordon reached for the olive branch he was trying to extend, any movement on his part was liable to put both himself and Layla in the ground.

  “C’mon, mate…”, he pleaded. “Think this through… You wouldn’t have found this if it weren’t for us…”

  Once again, no response was forthcoming. His nervousness ratcheted a few notches tighter, his thoughts spiraling around and around trying to think of ways to placate the man who had effectively taken them all hostage.

  Nearly a full minute dragged on in that limbo. He noticed Layla subtly peering around him to get a better look at what was happening, only to cover her mouth when she saw the body on the ground.

  For a brief moment, a pang of guilt flashed in him that she had to see that. He himself could never quite get over those lifeless orbs of his eyes looking back up at him, all glassy-looking. It made him queasy to stare for too long to this day.

  But, at the same time, so many of his copies had died since they last saw each other that he could likely fill a whole swimming pool with the corpses. Repeat enough times, and the shock factor inevitably started to diminish.

  For the most part, he was numb to it. She, evidently, wasn’t. The sight probably struck a bit too close to home.

  He could, in the most true sense, only imagine how it affected her.

  And, in an equally true sense, they were also pulled away from the brink.

  Gordon fished out a small handful of zip-ties and passed them off to his superior turned subordinate. “Tie them up,” he demanded of the Harpy. “And they’re going in first.”

  It complied unquestioningly. Bindings clutched in one hand, it lifted Henry back up onto his feet with just one arm. The robotic movements it made came as a stark reminder how decidedly lifelike it had been before. In comparison, these felt stiff and measured. He would have never guessed that there was anyone still home inside that metal cranium up until the point where the Harpy grabbed his wrists and held them together.

  it murmured the second it made contact with him.

  Henry couldn’t say he was exactly confident in its doublespeak. A pointed glance down towards his crystal was made, in an attempt to silently ask if they should all just make a break for it. As the final zip tie was tightened, it left him with one last remark.

  Then it broke off contact, and the moment of lucidity was gone. Wordlessly, it moved over to Layla and strengthened her admittedly ill-equipped bindings, and just like that they were ready to venture forth.

  With himself and Layla in front, and the two high ranking members of the Gentleman’s Club scrutinizing them from behind, they descended. Wading into the fog one step at a time, within seconds they were submerged in a misty layer so thick that Henry could barely see his own hands in front of him.

  Progress slowed to a crawl as he tentatively pressed on, carefully feeling out each step so as to not tumble down the rest of the way.

  He nearly tripped and fell on several occasions. Mainly due to those behind him pressing him onward quicker than he’d liked to have taken things with such poor visibility. While he never ended up with anything as bad as a full-on faceplant… somehow, he was the only one who was stumbling on the way down.

  He had to imagine Layla was cheating a bit with her Domain. She strode forward confidently, eyes facing forward as if the surrounding haze wasn’t even there. Though, her mind seemed to be… elsewhere, for the moment.

  Her body moved like it was on autopilot, predicting the gentle curve in the meandering footpath before he even knew to begin to look. All without turning her head or ranging her sight further along.

  Eventually, when the stairs grew narrow enough to force them into single file, he let her take the lead. Seemed like she had a better sense of things down here than he did.

  Just as he wondered if they’d ever reach the bottom, his wandering thoughts made him lurch as his foot touched down on flat ground sooner than he’d anticipated. They found themselves in the very bottom of the chasm, and looking up above at the path they took to get there gave him the distinct impression of being in the bottom of a well. The faint glow from Gordon’s light talisman was barely enough to see by, but as cramped as the entrance to this sub-level was the glossy smooth surface of polished stone walls reflected it enough for him to make out surrounding details once again.

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  Not that there was much to see down here to begin with… but he could see again. Important to take the small victories when you had the chance, after all.

  There were only two elements of any importance down here, as far as he could tell. One was the flight of stairs they had arrived from, little more than a series of roughly foot-sized square pegs that jutted out of the smooth cylindrical walls at precise intervals. Similar to the ones they had taken to enter the temple, but just ever so slightly more human friendly.

  These steps didn’t have gaps your foot could get caught in on the way down, miraculously.

  Aside from that, the only object of note this far down was a lone, ominous-looking doorway made of heavy steel. It looked like the sort of reinforced frame you’d see on a battleship, made out of armor plates seemingly as thick as Henry’s hand was long and was absolutely in inscriptions from head to toe. It hummed faintly as magic energy from deeper within bled into the nighttime air, faint multicolored sparks trailing lazily across the surface.

  “Any idea what we’re looking at?”, he asked Layla, the apparent resident expert on enchanting. “Something tells me that getting this open won’t be as simple as speaking ‘friend’ and entering.”

  “Oh, that would be the understatement of the century, right there,” she agreed. “It’s mostly the same Fire glyph repeated over and over, but there’s… it looks as though there’s a few Tech lines underneath, too. Though that’s not what’s the most troubling.”

  “Really? Something more worrying than… whatever trap they’ve cooked up for their most secret door yet? …Space lasers? Is it space lasers?”

  “Lasers are more light than heat, you know.”

  “Hey, I’m just throwing ideas out there- um… anyways… you were saying?”

  Layla nodded. With some considerable effort to maintain balance on her part, she pointed towards a particular spot on the door at about chest height with the tip of her boot.

  “Gh- this would be easier to show if I could use my hands…” she grumbled, grunting with exertion as she leaned as far backwards as the frame of her backpack would allow. “But… that part right there is a Law Domain enchantment. And it looks like it ties in to the rest of them, on a deeper layer.”

  “Wait, a bloody enchantment?!”, Henry blurted. “Where the… how the did the Subway Wizards get their hands on a Law mage?!”

  “No idea. And yet, here’s the evidence, plain as day.”

  “You’re ?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Henry’s eyes boggled as he took a closer look at the point Layla had indicated. Law Domain was the absolute of the classical Domains, by a long shot. And for a good damn reason.

  Law didn’t refer to the ‘go to jail if you commit a crime’ sort of law. It applied to the laws of physics.

  Though, to be fair, that was an overly dramatic way of phrasing it. Newtonian physics was a more apt classification, thank the Lord. So until something else in this blasted cesspit came by to prove his assumptions wrong, that at least meant the absolutely ridiculous stuff like controlling space and time were off the menu.

  Still, there was a lot that could be done with force, mass and energy on their own. Theoretically, at least. Ever the limiter was the word . Hard to gather solid facts on something so astronomically rare he wondered if it didn’t technically fall into Exotic Domain territory.

  ...Anyways. Theoretically. Given a sufficiently powerful Law mage or similar enchantment array, it be possible to disrupt the very rules the Domain was intended to manipulate. For the longest time, such a pursuit had been regarded as the Holy Grail of cutting-edge Domain research… until the mounting costs reminded everyone exactly why that quest was historically labeled as a fool’s errand.

  Even after sinking in countless hours, hundreds of hundreds of millions of pounds sterling and eventually euros from God knows where, along with likely enough mana to power every leyline in the whole of Great Britain for a month straight… the closest Liverpool Institute ever got to that hope was an on-paper schematic that involved arrays upon arrays of enchantments. On a planetary scale.

  As soon as the investors heard that their best shot would be to convert the entire volume of into inscripted substrate, funding into that avenue of research dried up faster than the taps on the night of the World Cup.

  The end result of all that expenditure, then? Apparently some bloke from the States used it to patent a hoverboard before the year 2015, so… there was that, Henry supposed.

  Money well spent.

  “So, let me summarize for a moment, then. This door is very clearly trapped, and whatever it is, it’s most likely nasty to be on the receiving end of. We have no idea what’s behind it, or if it’s meant to keep us out or something else in. All we know is that great lengths were made to keep it closed. Sound about right?”

  “Pretty much sums it up,” Layla said after listening to Henry’s analysis.

  “Right, let’s get this over with then.”

  “Wha- Henry, what are you-?!”

  “Hey, ” he addressed mockingly back towards where he stood at the base of the stairs. “Do we want to head back up while my latest copy clears out the trap?”

  Layla’s mortified expression was apparent, even with the hood over her head. “You mean you plan to trip that ”

  “Why not? It’s the whole reason they brought me along. It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

  “That… that's suicide!!”

  He took a deep breath, waiting for the go ahead from their watchdog as he slipped back into a familiar headspace.

  “Again,” he said in a more serious tone, “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  He summoned his available copy despite her protests, who in turn took a deep breath of his own and strode forward. With his wrists bound as they were from the zip-ties that copied along with him, the copy’s ability to grasp the crank handle of the steel door was just a touch tricky… but manageable.

  “Right, ready when you are, then,” the duplicate called out to Gordon. “How do you want to do this? Do I count to one hundred, then start turning, or-?”

  A heavy, grating rumble from above cut off his line of questioning abruptly. What faint glimmers of light had been able to trickle down from above were swiftly snuffed out as the sound of stone scraping against stone reached their ears.

  The pillar was coming back down.

  “Go. ” Gordon’s command belted out loud and clear, and the duplicate obeyed immediately. “Harpy. Shields in front.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Henry and Layla stepped back closer to the stairs as the Harpy’s bladed wings swiveled around to block out whatever the door had in store. With an industrial groan, the crank spun slowly as the copy put everything he had into unlatching the bulkhead door. From every angle, the sound of scraping bounded along the perfectly smooth walls, amplifying the impending sense of doom inching closer from above.

  One by one, the steps of the stairs slid back into the wall, leaving them trapped in a perfectly cylindrical pit as they awaited with bated breath. Not even a blemish remained to show the steps had even been there to begin with. The entire surface was perfectly flush.

  No way out but through, now.

  “Hnng- almost… there!”, the copy shouted. The Harpy’s wings angled sharply in response, forming a wedge to deflect the worst of whatever stray damage might head their way.

  Henry looked up. He could almost swear he saw the base of the pillar slowly descending towards them. Imagined it spinning like a millstone, ready to grind them into paste if they didn’t move quickly.

  He shuddered. That would be a horrible way to go, even by his standards.

  A heavy clank, and the door swung wide open.

  A faint, flickering vision that made him feel like spiders with needles for legs were tap-dancing all over him. A blazing red-orange flash of light wrapped around the edges of the Harpy’s wings, and as soon as it dissipated the four of them bolted for the open portal. The steel plates of its wings came back cherry-red as they locked back into their resting position.

  A glance above told Henry his prior suspicions had been exactly correct. A glance down showed the charred remains of his copy, one half disintegrated entirely with a blackened fault line that cut cleanly down the torso at a sharp, downwards angle.

  He didn’t have time to think about any of it. All that was on his mind was the need to pile in to the relative safety of the hallway beyond, just as the Harpy was ducking low to do right now.

  Close didn’t even begin to describe it. With mere moments to spare, they all made it inside as the pillar crashed to the earth below. Each one of them doubled over, gasping for breath save the cyborg that led the way. As the remaining gap beneath the pillar disappeared, it spun for a few revolutions more, before friction ground it to a halt at long last.

  Henry noticed a thin puddle of blood seeping out from beneath, and grimaced. It really a horrible way to go.