Noah stepped through to the other side and found his fellow recruits in various states of awe, and he could understand why.
He turned around just to confirm what he already suspected. Behind him there was nothing. No shimr of purple energy, no residual glow where the portal had been. The air where he’d stepped through looked exactly like the air everywhere else. Just dead grey expanse running back into the distance.
He thought as much.
’This is exactly how I got into this ss in the first place.’
He turned back around.
The land in every direction was the sa. Flat and cracked, the ground split open in long jagged lines that branched and split again until the whole surface was a map of fractures with no clear origin point. The soil between cracks was pale and powdery, the color of sothing that had been dry for so long it had forgotten what moisture felt like. There were trees, or the remains of trees, standing at irregular intervals across the flat ground. Their bark was entirely gone, the wood underneath bleached to near white and smooth, the branches jutting off at sharp sudden angles that looked less like growth and more like sothing interrupted mid-motion and frozen there. Nothing grew on them or near them or anywhere else that Noah could see. The sky above was low and grey, not stormy, just colorless, a flat ceiling that gave no indication of ti or weather or any intention to change.
Everywhere was completely still. No wind at all.
Pip was maybe three bodies ahead of him, turning in a slow circle with his chin up. Werner had already walked ten feet forward and stopped with his hands on his hips. Several of the green recruits had already quietly closed ranks with each other the way they always did when a situation felt uncertain.
"Where are we?" soone asked.
"Not ho," Pip said, still completing his turn.
A pause.
"Thanks for that," a voice ca from sowhere to Noah’s right. "Genuinely useful information."
"You’re welco."
Noah looked out past the imdiate cluster of people around him. The dead land stretched flat in every direction, broken only by the pale skeletal trees standing at their strange arrested angles. And then far out, far enough that you had to actually look for it, sothing stood against the grey sky.
Two stone pillars. Rising high enough that their tops dissolved into the low cloud and were simply gone. An arch connecting them that was visible even at this distance because of the sheer density of carvings covering the stone, markings running across every surface in continuous bands. No walls flanking either pillar. No structure around it. The gate just stood there alone in the middle of the dead landscape, freestanding, as if it had been planted there the sa way the bleached trees had been and had simply outlasted everything else.
"Is that what I think it is," Pip said. He wasn’t quite asking.
"What do you think it is?" Nami said.
"Sothing we’re eventually going to have to walk toward."
He wasn’t wrong. There was nothing else in any direction. Just the dead land and the gate standing at its center.
"It’s a gate," Werner said.
He said it with the clarity of soone who has just recognized sothing rather than simply seen it, and that quality in his voice pulled people’s attention toward him. He was still looking at the structure in the distance, jaw set.
"My father talked about them. He didn’t like talking about this particular part of things."
"What particular part of things?" Sera asked.
Werner was quiet for a mont, still looking at the distant gate. "You know the history of the three kingdoms. The war."
"Arthur’s dragons," soone said.
"Arthur’s dragons. He brought them into the fighting, and they weren’t wild ones, they were controlled, directed, used as weapons, and the other two kingdoms had nothing that could answer it. Whole cities were reduced to foundations. Entire populations gone in a matter of days. The kind of damage that doesn’t get rebuilt, it just becos the new shape of the land." He paused. "Then a woman ca."
The scattered clusters of recruits had been drifting inward by degrees while Werner was talking, people moving closer without making any conscious decision to do so.
"No na of hers appears in any record that survived. She ca to all three kingdoms separately, t with each king, made demands, and the accounts don’t agree on what those demands were. What they do agree on is what happened after." Werner looked away from the gate and at the people around him. "She blessed the land. Whatever she actually did, it changed sothing fundantal. People started developing abilities that had never existed before. Channeling fire. Enhancing their own strength beyond what the body should be capable of. Healing wounds that should kill soone." He gestured at the recruits around him, at all of them. "Every ability anyone in this kingdom has ever awakened traces back to what she did. The dragon knight order exists because of her. We exist because of her."
Nobody spoke for a mont.
"She gave us our powers," Pip said slowly, working through the scale of it out loud.
"She changed the land and the land changed the people over generations. That’s how my father described it." Sothing moved through Werner’s expression that wasn’t quite comfortable. "But that wasn’t the only thing she did. She also opened gates."
"Why?" soone asked from behind Noah.
"Two versions of the story." Werner held up a finger. "First version. There was a falling out. The kings agreed to her conditions and then broke them, or never intended to honor them at all, and the gates were her answer. She opened doors into other worlds and told them whatever ca through was their burden to carry." A second finger. "Second version. It was a gift. She wanted people to have a way to go sowhere that couldn’t be reached any other way, survive what was inside, and co back with sothing they couldn’t have found anywhere else."
"Which version is true?" Pip asked.
"Nobody who’s written about it will commit to one. Truth remains to be seen, according to every account."
"A blessed item," Nami said.
Werner looked at her.
"That’s what’s in there." She was looking at the gate. "That’s what the instructors told us the Black Room was for. That’s why we’re here."
The word moved through the group the way cold does, not all at once, reaching everyone at a slightly different mont. They had all spent days knowing the Black Room led to the items, the things that bonded to you specifically and amplified what you already were. Every knight who’d made it through training carried one. Ironside’s. Egor’s. The items the veteran knights treated with a particular kind of familiarity that was different from how they treated ordinary weapons. None of them had pictured this.
"Why didn’t the instructors tell us what it actually was?" Cath asked. Her hands were clasped in front of her, knuckles sitting at the edge of white.
"Because parents would stop sending their children," the thin green recruit beside her said. His voice carried no particular emotion, just flatness. "Everyone back ho believes dragons are what kills trainees. So don’t co back, the work is dangerous, everyone understands that. But telling a parent you’re sending their child through a door to another world entirely is a different conversation."
"Every camp is built around one," Werner continued. "That’s why recruits can’t find the camps without an escort. The knights who bring you aren’t just accompanying you for courtesy. They’re navigating by the gate’s pull. When a gate closes, the order relocates to wherever the next active one is. New location, new camp, sa training."
"How does a gate close?" Noah asked.
"Kill whatever is at the center of it. Every gate has sothing running it, so kind of boss is the word the old accounts use. Kill it and the gate closes. That’s how the old knights operated. Go in, clear whatever was inside, take what was worth taking, co back out." Werner looked at the gate again. "They aren’t common anymore. She stopped opening them, or she left, or sothing happened that nobody recorded. The active ones that still exist are the old ones. The order found them and built around them."
"Before they even fully understood what they were," Pip said.
"Before they fully understood what they were."
Pip absorbed that. "So there was a period where the dragon knight order was constructing training facilities next to mysterious ancient doors they didn’t entirely understand."
"Essentially."
"That is a very comforting piece of institutional history." Pip said.
The group went quiet again, everyone looking at the gate in the distance. It stood there the sa way it had been standing, enormous and patient, waiting for them to stop talking.
"There’s nothing else out here," Sera said. She’d walked forty feet in one direction while Werner was talking, far enough to confirm what they could already see from where they stood, and had co back. "In any direction. Just this."
Nobody had anything to add to that.
They started walking.
Noah walked with the group and let his mind work quietly while his feet covered ground. The woman Werner had described, the one with no na in any surviving record, she had done sothing that changed human biology across an entire kingdom and left it changed for generations. In his own tiline the chanism had been the harbinger seed, a thing that crashed into the Earth and cracked the core and released void energy upward through the ground, and that energy changed human DNA over ti and gave people abilities that hadn’t existed before. Different cause, sa shape of outco. Soone or sothing introduced a foreign energy into a world and the world’s people adapted around it.
But the harbinger seed had been an accident. Nobody chose it. Nobody demanded anything in exchange.
This woman had chosen it. Had walked into a war between three kingdoms and reshaped the fundantal nature of human capability and attached conditions to it. Had opened gates into other worlds and left them running.
Who did that? What kind of person walked into a war between three kingdoms and bent it to their will?
He didn’t have an answer. He filed it away and kept walking.
---
The gate was a different thing entirely up close.
At distance it had registered as enormous. Standing at its base it stopped being a size that words handled comfortably. Each pillar was wide enough that four people with arms fully extended couldn’t have bridged it. The stone was dark, nearly black, and the carvings ran across every surface so densely that finding unmarked stone took deliberate searching. Figures, symbols, lines of script in a language none of them could read, bands of text that ran from the ground up without interruption until the cloud swallowed the upper sections of the pillars and everything above that was simply gone. Standing at the base and looking up was less like looking at a building and more like looking at a cliff face, sothing that existed at a different scale than the one humans normally inhabited.
The gate between the pillars was solid stone. No seam visible. No handle, no gap where doors might et, no indication of any chanism at all. Just a flat face of dark carved stone stretching forty feet wide and going up until it beca part of the pillar and kept going.
Werner walked ahead of the group. He reached out toward the stone, hand extended, closing the last foot of distance between his palm and the surface.
The gate opened before he touched it.
A sound ca from deep inside the stone, low and grinding, the complaint of sothing enormous deciding to move after a very long ti of not moving. A line appeared running from the ground upward down the center of the stone face and both halves began drawing inward, slowly, without drama, the way a door opens for soone who was already expected.
Werner took two steps back without looking away from it.
Several seconds of silence.
"Well," Pip said eventually. "That was easy."
The opening beyond was dark, not completely, a faint warm glow existed sowhere further in that didn’t reach the entrance. The air coming through was different from the still dead air outside. Not warr. Not colder. Just older, the way a room slls when it hasn’t been opened in a very long ti.
They looked at each other.
Then they walked in.
The inside of the gate was a tower, a single vertical shaft of space with walls rising straight on all sides until they disappeared into dark far overhead. The floor was flat worn stone, large enough that all hundred and fifty recruits could spread out without pressing against each other. Every wall surface was covered in the sa dense carvings as the outside, running from the floor up into the darkness above without break.
A low heavy sound rolled through the chamber behind them.
Noah turned. The gate was closing. Both stone halves drawing back together the sa way they’d opened, slow and indifferent, the gap between them narrowing until the line between them disappeared and there was only solid stone where the entrance had been.
No handle on this side either.
A few recruits near the back moved toward it instinctively, hands pressing against the stone, and the stone gave nothing back. Soone hit it with a fist. The sound it made was the sound of hitting sothing that had no interest in being hit.
"Don’t waste energy," Werner said.
Nobody argued, but nobody looked particularly reassured either.
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