Mari’s body was the first to impact the oily surface. Terror consumed her mind. A wave of disorienting nausea followed, stronger than anything she had felt in her first encounter at Tailweavers. The oily substrate permeated her fur with a deep cold that pierced into her core. Darkness swallowed her vision, followed by a barely audible sound that rose sharply into something like a popping sensation. It almost sounded like it said… glorp?

  As she stepped into this realm, the ground was less sticky than she expected. The landscape was made of fine black rock, smooth as glass, stretching outward in gentle slopes and hard angles. A crackle of red energy flashed through the sky, blotted with deep gray, jagged clouds. Each burst of light refracted through the black surface below, throwing brief colors across the ground. The brighter ones faded quickly, as if being pulled down into the rock by gravity.

  Jerro, Greg, and Phlip emerged through the portal behind her. To her surprise, they were not coated in tar the way she had imagined they might be after what happened in the cave.

  Greg surveyed the strange horizon. “Where in the burrow are we?” he asked aloud, his voice echoing off the rock.

  “No idea.” Mari replied, scanning the open space for any sign of the hyrax.

  Jerro’s nose wrinkled. He sniffed the air in quick succession. “Oh, man… do you smell that?”

  “No wha–” Mari started, but she was interrupted by her own gag reflex and had to swallow back bile.

  A sickly-sweet, rotten stink of putrid fruit overtook the group. Mari turned toward her friends just as the portal snapped closed behind them. Their tracking bracelets from Station flipped to a red glow, then faded out, severing their link to the system. Where the portal had been, something else remained.

  An amorphous blob of malformed flesh stood in its place, reshaping itself in slow, wet movements. An eye opened where no eye should be. A mouth formed lower down, drooling saliva that stringed and snapped as it fell. How did we miss this? Mari thought. It must have been obscured by the portal.

  The creature coughed up what looked like a cracked egg from its mouth, then let out a small yet deep, ferociously distorted roar. It expanded in size like it was being inflated, and the flesh rolled outward in thick layers toward Phlip.

  Phlip’s glassy eyes expanded to full size. He tried to hop away, but a slab of meat slammed down in ?his path, blocking him like a wall.

  “Phlip!” Mari yelled in horror. In unison, the friends rallied to his aid.

  Jerro dropped his monocular down over one eye, searching for anything that could give them an opening. Greg and Mari moved in a choreographed sequence that felt familiar, like their engagement with the giant earthworm had trained their bodies more than they realized.

  Greg began a rotational gesture. It was intuitive, yet completely novel, like his paws were following instructions written into the air. Mari charged toward him, sliding down a smooth section of black rock that offered almost no resistance. The surface was slick, but predictable, and she used it to build speed. As she reached Greg, she leapt, and his rotation guided her into orbit around him.

  Words became unnecessary. They were one. Senses, minds, ability, all melded into a single timing. Mari’s rotation accelerated, her fur and outline beginning to glow a deep shade of blue. As she spun, her body assumed geometric forms that seemed to bend what they knew of reality. Cubes, spheres, diamonds, appearing in brief impressions that flickered and then smoothed back into her shape.

  Jerro saw something through the monocular. Just like the pipe in Deepworks, there was an unusual vibration hidden in the rock. A subtle shimmer, almost like heat distortion, but localized to a specific outcropping. Obsidian. He recognized it from his geology studies from Builders Basic, the way it held tension and how it failed when pushed the right way.

  He placed a paw to his temple and focused his frequency modulation on the outcropping. If he could fracture it cleanly, a sharp slab of obsidian could be sheared off. Not dust—not rubble—a single edge.

  Mari built speed until her orbit tightened. Her posture changed, not tense, but purposeful. Hind paws dangling gently together, arms stretched loosely to her sides, her orientation fixed on the creature engulfing Phlip.

  This all happened in mere seconds.

  The rock face sheared as Jerro had anticipated. The obsidian split with a crisp break that felt too clean for a place like this. Mari launched from the rotation, tearing toward the flesh mass with tremendous speed. Greg and Jerro both raised their paws to shield their eyes as the ambient light seemed to pull inward toward Mari’s glow.

  Mari tore through the creature almost instantly, carving a gaping chasm through the mass of flesh. Simultaneously, the razor-sharp slab of obsidian was drawn into her path as the local psionic structure faltered. The supporting field that held the creature’s shape and orientation stuttered, and gravity behaved differently in that narrow corridor.

  That was enough.

  The slab snapped into the wake of Mari’s passage and cut through what remained, rendering the creature into pieces that flew off with the obsidian into the distance, tumbling across the black rock until the red light swallowed them.

  Mari stood at a distance, facing the group, panting, the blue glow fading back into the dimness.

  Phlip dropped a few pellets onto the black rock and hopped over toward Greg and Jerro, seemingly unaffected by the entire event.

  That was… unreal, Jerro sent, lungs burning.

  Mari was already sprinting back. Phlip bounced to meet her, exuberant as ever.

  “Now, let’s go find this giant creep!” Mari said when she reached them.

  Jerro shrugged off his pack. “Hey. I’ve got something that might help.”

  He pulled out his Decanter of Aquarius. “No, that’s not it,” he said, then paused. “But I am thirsty…” He took a swig from the container and swapped it for another item. “Ah, this is it.” He produced a worn map case, unlatched it, and slid the parchment out in a slow roll, flattening it as it emerged.

  The map shimmered into view and wavered—more suggestion than chart. Lines and circles, odd shapes looping and branching, as if it were identifying relationships instead of landmarks.

  “Hmmm… That’s not very helpful,” Jerro muttered, giving it a frustrated shake.

  “That crazy thing from Rufus’s study… How is that going to help us?” Greg asked. It was the same question Mari would have asked, but she was still cooling down from the recent event, her breathing only just returning to normal.

  “I thought… I thought maybe we could make sense of it,” Jerro said. “I’d sort of forgotten about it until just now, but maybe it can help us track them down. Rufus must have wanted us to take it for a reason.”

  They leaned in as the map reorganized itself. The oily ink shifted in slow waves, dragging against their paws like static. A local landscape revealed, fading at the edges as if it refused to commit beyond a certain distance. Along the top, words appeared in a language they understood—formed from their thoughts more than the page.

  The Glorp.

  “That’s the sound from the portal!” Mari said, pointing at the title. “Must be what this place is called?”

  Jerro stared at it, then glanced back at the strange horizon. “Maybe.” He said, half to himself.

  “Look over there.” Mari added, pointing into the distance at a spire-like structure. She looked back down at the map. “That must be this place.” Her paw traced ?a similar shape that was drawing itself out in the ink like the parchment was catching up to what she was seeing.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “It seems like the most logical place to start.” Jerro agreed.

  They took off in a file toward the spire. Mari led the group, mounted on Phlip’s back, Jerro followed in the middle, gliding on his disk, and Greg took up the rear on all fours, making quick work of the challenging terrain. They navigated the unsettling planescape carefully, weaving between massive outcroppings of jagged stone and doing their best to hold a linear path in their chosen direction.

  Despite moving toward the spire, it seemed to move as well. Mari was sure of it. She distinctly remembered the mountain behind the spire that looked like a large cookie with a bite taken out of it. That formation was now far down the horizon, too far for it to be explained by their movement alone.

  “Guys,” Jerro said, and his voice tightened. “I’m picking up something on my monocular. I think it’s tracks. Not footprints, but psionic essence.” He paused, searching for a description that he had no words for. “I’ve got two powerful signatures, and a third one that’s… unique. It’s not psionic. It’s anomalous. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The psionic matrix seems to be warping along the path.”

  “Whatever it is, we face it together.” Mari responded. Greg gave a firm nod of commitment.

  The terrain shifted ahead of them. Beyond a razor ridge of obsidian, a plain of dark blue grass stretched out toward the spire, which was now fully visible from base to precipice. The field was dotted with pools of dark, tarry liquid, the same substance Jerro had stepped in back in the tunnels. Singular flesh monsters wandered through the open spaces. Some climbed in and out of the ichor pools. Others sat motionless, as though they were waiting. A few grew and transformed in place, rearranging themselves into various configurations as though they were testing different shapes.

  Then the wind shifted.

  A blast of rotten banana aroma rolled across the field, thick enough to taste, drawn toward them like a warning.

  They lined up along the ridge crest. Lying flat, their bodies pressed tightly against the stone to avoid giving away their location. Together they took in the scene.

  “I’m assuming we will want to avoid that?” Greg whispered.

  “Look,” Mari whispered, pointing toward the spire. “It is moving. I knew it.”

  The spire was crawling along, supported by a mass of rolling tar that carried it forward and left a wake of residue behind. Up close, it was not just one tower, but a complex of helical spires coalescing into a single structure that reached into the blood-red sky. Beyond it, a distant mountain chain sat in silhouette, rugged against the clouds.

  “Okay,” Mari said, keeping her voice low as she tracked its movement. “Look at the path it’s taking. It’s heading toward that stretch where the ridge tapers down into the field.” She gestured with her paw to outline the angle. “If we hurry, I think we can beat it there. It’s not moving that fast. Then we just have to figure out how to get on it.”

  Greg held out a fisted paw toward the center of the group. Mari and Jerro placed their paws in.

  Jerro cleared his throat, dead serious. “Pawple Horizon.” He waited for approval with a hopeful smile. “You know, like purple, but I changed the ‘pur’ to ‘paw’.”

  Mari blinked. “Jerro. What—why are you like this?”

  “The ship name,” Greg said, like this was normal. “He’s trying to come up with names for the ship.” He kept his tone calm. “Jerro, that’s a great name. Let’s keep exploring our options. Assuming we make it out of here.”

  Jerro lit up. “I get it. Maybe that isn’t the one. But the name is in here somewhere.” He tapped his skull with a grin.

  “Let’s get moving,” Mari said, pulling them back on track. She hopped up and slung herself onto Phlip. “Come on.”

  They slipped down the back side of the ridge toward the interception point she had picked.

  They beat the spire there, but it was moving quicker than Mari had anticipated. In moments it would pass their position, close enough to count details. Fifty tails or fewer.

  The ground trembled as the fortress sloughed forward, carried by the rolling tar mass beneath it. A flesh creature wandered too close, and the tar rolled over it. It disappeared entirely, consumed without a struggle, leaving only a smear that blended back into the undulating mass.

  Mari stared up at the structure as it neared. There was no clear path up. The fortress was nearly as high as it was far away.

  Shadows flickered over their hiding place. All four of them looked up together.

  Half a dozen large flying creatures landed on a balcony perched high on the spire, folding their wings as if the tower belonged to them.

  “No way I can make that jump,” Greg said, eyeing the height and distance.

  “Maybe not,” Jerro replied, scanning through his monocular. His voice stayed calm, but his focus sharpened. “But maybe there’s another way.” He angled the monocular toward the rear of the moving fortress. “Check that out.”

  A small hatch opened. Three hyraxes emerged carrying long pitchforks. They jabbed down into the rolling tar and worked their tools with practiced rhythm, extracting bits and pieces of the flesh creature that had been swallowed moments earlier. They lifted the pieces out like harvest, inspecting them briefly before dragging them back toward the hatch.

  Greg watched, then grimaced. “Uhh… I totally get what you’re thinking, Jerro, but look at that thing. It’s been dismembered.”

  The window to act was closing quickly as the spire approached the tapered outcropping and began to align with Mari’s chosen point.

  “Trust me, guys. On my tail,” Jerro said, instinct taking over. He floated out from the rocks on his disk, moving toward the front edge of the tar mass.

  Mari and Greg looked at each other. With an exasperated shrug, they followed.

  Jerro pushed the thought to them as they ran. I’m not sure what kind of forces we’re going to have to withstand, so I will need both of you. He glanced back once, then pointed to the ground. Gather here fast, and channel everything you’ve got into me.

  They formed a small triangle with Phlip in the middle and Jerro facing the approaching fortress, his back to them.

  Jerro took a knee in concentration, head down, paw pressed to his temple. The rolling tar mass drew closer. The rocks trembled beneath them, and dust kicked up in small bursts with each heavy slide of the spire’s movement.

  Jerro looked up quickly and stood.

  A sphere of crackling energy erupted around them, then stabilized, spreading thin tendrils between them like taut lines. Jerro turned fully toward the oncoming mass and braced for impact.

  It consumed them entirely with the same glorp sound they had heard at the portal. It was dark, dimly lit only by the deep yellow glow of Jerro’s protective barrier. Their location, direction of travel, and orientation were quickly lost as the tar blotted out all external reference.

  Mari and Greg strained, driving their energy into Jerro to maintain the shield.

  The forces are intense. Jerro sent, his thoughts tight and measured, but if we can maintain this for a few more moments, we should be okay. I timed how long it took for the flesh monster. We only have to hold it for four minutes.

  Four minutes, while brief, felt like four hours to the friends as they fought with every molecule of their being to keep the barrier intact. It fluctuated more than once, and Jerro rearranged the structure to support the shifting load. Chunks of flesh, rock, and other debris crashed into the field, changing the pressure and strain in unpredictable bursts.

  We’re almost there! Mari sent, and clung to it.

  She didn’t know that, not truly, but she felt it. Or she needed to. She imagined that if she could will it into existence for herself, it could be true for all of them.

  They were almost there.

  A fork pierced the force field, and tar began leaking in. Phlip shifted slightly to avoid the spilling goo and scratched his ear, calm in a way that reflected his ignorance of the danger. Mari almost laughed, then caught it in her throat. This was not the time, but Phlip was still Phlip.

  Light poured in through the breach and quickly spread around the sphere, illuminating the scene beyond the barrier.

  Greg, hit them quick. I can hold this with Jerro! Mari sent urgently.

  Greg shot up through the hole as Jerro widened it, forcing the hyrax’s fork to come free.

  The gang of hyraxes stood on a platform just above the rolling tar foundation, completely unprepared for what came next. In one sweeping, practiced movement, Greg launched himself forward, and it looked for a moment like he was running on open air just above their position. He moved with blinding speed, his path precise and controlled.

  His first impact alone knocked one hyrax off the platform into the gooey foundation below. It disappeared immediately, swallowed without a trace.

  Greg was already on the next one. His movement became so fast it was hard to follow, as if he was phasing from one position to the other. He drove an Earthshaker Pawstrike into its sternum.

  The hyrax’s body barely shifted, but something else did.

  Its ephemeral essence tore backward into space and dissipated into the red sky. The physical form seemed to lose cohesion, bonds releasing at an atomic level, and collapsed into a pile of unidentifiable particulate.

  The third hyrax turned and fled toward a large service door. It reached for the control panel.

  It wasn’t quick enough. Greg was already there, behind it.

  He pivoted and drove a rounded kick through its side. The impact landed with a dull, unreal heaviness, and the air rippled with psionic pressure. The hyrax skidded across the deck, slammed into a railing, and went limp in a crumpled heap.

  Greg grabbed one of the forks and ran to the edge of the platform where the shielded sphere was sinking back into the tar.

  “Grab on!” he shouted, lowering the fork down toward the barrier.

  Mari reached up with one paw, splitting her focus to catch the end of the pitchfork while still feeding energy into Jerro. The shield shuddered. Jerro strained. The tar pressed and pulled around them like a living weight.

  As they rose from the muck, Jerro could let the upper portion of the barrier down, thinning it until it became less of a sphere and more of a protective bowl around their bodies.

  With all their might, Greg, Mari, Jerro and Phlip pulled themselves free of the deadly foundation.

  They collapsed onto the deck, breathing hard, tar spattering their fur. Above them, the sky shifted to a deeper shade of red and bruise-dark orange.