The Descent

The Descent

Aga - The Gates of Seda

The city did not smell like a city anymore. It smelled like a carcass left too long in the sun—bloated, sweet, and bursting with rot.

Aga moved against the tide of humanity with his shoulder dropped, using his body like a wedge to split the screaming, panicked river of refugees. He did not look at their faces. To look was to hesitate, and to hesitate was to lose the mark.

The scent—his only lead—was a thin, silver thread winding through the heavy, choking stench of sweat, soot, and unwashed bodies. It was that cold, ozone-sharp hunger he associated with the Abyss, and it was pulling him deeper, past the gates, toward the heart of the chaos.

"Keep up," he growled, not looking back.

Behind him, the chain of "civilized" fools was struggling.

Faren was practically being carried by the current of the crowd, his face a mask of sheer, overwhelming terror. He looked at every passing face, searching for his wife, his children, his eyes wide and wet. Elara moved with a cold, mechanical efficiency, using the heavy brass stock of her Etheric cannon to shove people out of her path, her eyes darting around not with fear, but with frantic calculation.

And Gaidan... the soldier was a wounded wolf. His shattered wrist was bound tight against his chest with the strip of cloth, the white linen already spotted with red. His face was grey with shock, sweat beading on his forehead, but his good hand gripped a dagger with white-knuckled intensity. He was scanning the rooftops, the alleys, the shadows. He knew, perhaps better than the scholars, that the fire was the least of their problems.

They broke through the main crush at the city gates and spilled into the Merchant’s Plaza.

Here, the stampede thinned, but the horror sharpened.

The air in the plaza was thick with a yellow, oily fog that seemed to cling to the cobblestones. It wasn't smoke. It was heavy, swirling around the ankles of the looting mobs like a living thing, smelling faintly of sulfur and old copper.

The light from the burning refinery cast everything in a sick, jaundiced glow, stripping the color from the world and leaving only shades of bruised yellow and black.

"The readings..." Elara murmured, glancing at the brass gauge on her wrist, though the glass face was cracked. She tapped it frantically. "The ambient psychic pressure... it’s spiking off the scale. This isn't just panic. It’s amplification."

"What does that mean, witch?" Aga snapped, pausing to get his bearings. The yellow fog tasted metallic on his tongue.

"It means," Elara said, her voice tight, "that the Etheric explosion has combined with a biological catalyst. It's affecting the limbic systems of the populace. Everyone here is experiencing their worst emotional impulse, magnified a thousand times. The 'Sepsis' isn't biological. It's behavioral."

As if summoned by her words, a man in fine silk robes stumbled out of a shattered jewelry shop to their left. He was clutching handfuls of gold chains, so many that they spilled through his fingers like water.

He wasn't running. He was laughing. A high, breathless, hysterical sound that grated on Aga's nerves.

"Mine," the man shrieked, his eyes wide and bloodshot, the pupils dilated until his eyes were black holes. saliva flecking his lips. "All mine! The ledger is balanced! Finally balanced!"

A City Guard, his helmet askew and his tabard torn, ran toward the merchant. But he didn't help him.

The guard raised his heavy mace and brought it down on the merchant’s skull with a sickening crunch.

"Disorder!" the guard roared, his face twisted in a rictus of furious obsession. He struck the fallen body again and again, long after the man was dead, the mace making a wet, rhythmic thud. "I will have order! I will have silence! I will have protocols!"

Faren let out a strangled cry and covered his mouth, gagging. "That's... that's Councilor Hiron. And Captain Vane. They... they know each other. They play cards on Tuesdays..."

"Not anymore," Aga said. He stepped forward, grabbing Faren by the collar of his robe and hauling him away from the gruesome scene. "Don't look. They are gone."

"We have to help them!" Faren struggled weakly, his scholar's hands gripping Aga's arm.

"You can't help a rabid dog," Aga said, his voice flat, devoid of cruelty but heavy with truth. "You put it down, or you walk away."

"Asset is correct," Gaidan rasped, his voice strained with pain as he leaned against a stone pillar. "Command structure is gone. Civilians are hostile. We keep moving."

Aga looked at the soldier. There was a grudging respect in the look. Gaidan was broken, in pain, and surrounded by madness, but his tactical instincts were iron.

They pushed deeper into the plaza. The scent Aga was tracking was getting stronger, but so was the fog. It was rising, now waist-high, obscuring the ground, hiding the bodies that Aga knew they were stepping over.

"The scent," Aga muttered, closing his eyes for a second to filter out the stench of blood, burning silk, and the ozone-sharp tang of the fog. "It went... down."

He opened his eyes. The silver thread of the scent didn't lead to the burning refinery tower. It dipped sharply, disappearing into the ground near the Great Fountain of the Founders.

"The sewers?" Elara wrinkled her nose. "Why would an Etheric anomaly go into the sanitation grid?"

"Because it’s hunting," Aga said. "And prey hides in the dark."

"My family..." Faren whispered, staring toward the residential district, which lay in the opposite direction, up the hill. "They wouldn't be in the sewers. They'd be at the house. Anya would take them to the cellar. I have to go to the house!"

He tried to pull away, turning toward a side street that led upward.

"Faren, wait!" Elara called out, reaching for him.

But Faren didn't listen. Driven by his own amplified guilt, fuelled by the yellow fog, he bolted toward the alleyway. "Anya! I'm coming!"

He made it three steps before the shadows moved.

They weren't shadows. They were people—or what was left of them. A group of five, huddled in the dark of the alley, their clothes torn, their skin smeared with soot and something darker. They had been waiting, still as statues, hidden by the fog.

They didn't speak. They just turned their heads in unison, their eyes glowing with that same faint, jaundiced light.

They hissed.

It was a sound like escaping steam, a collective release of pressure.

Faren froze, his momentum dying instantly.

"Back," Aga commanded, drawing Gaidan's longsword. The steel hummed in his hand, a heavy, lethal balance.

The pack lunged.

They moved with unnatural, jerky speed, limbs flailing, overriding the body's natural limits. The first one—a woman in a baker’s apron, her face blank of all humanity—leaped at Faren, her teeth bared, her fingers hooked like claws.

Faren screamed, throwing his hands up in a useless defense.

Aga didn't hesitate. He moved not like a duelist, but like a woodsman clearing brush. He stepped in front of Faren and swung the heavy sword in a flat, brutal arc.

The blade caught the woman in mid-air. There was no finesse, only the physics of steel meeting bone. She was thrown back into the wall with a wet thud, silent.

The others swarmed, undeterred by the death of their kin. They were driven by a singular, violent impulse.

"Clear the line!" Elara shouted, leveling her cannon.

Aga grabbed Faren by the back of his robes and shoved him violently to the ground, ducking low.

THOOM.

The sound was not an explosion, but a displacement of air. A beam of concentrated, blue-white energy erupted from Elara’s cannon. It hit the center of the charging group, not burning them, but blasting them backward with the force of a battering ram.

They slammed into the brickwork and slumped, unconscious or dead, their limbs tangled.

Silence returned to the alley, broken only by the high-pitched whine of Elara’s weapon recharging and Faren’s terrified sobbing.

"Inefficient," Elara muttered, checking the heat vents on the cannon, though her hands were shaking. "But effective."

Aga stood up, breathing hard through his nose. He looked at the bodies. They were just people. Neighbors. Shopkeepers. A baker.

"The sickness is in the air," Aga said, looking at the yellow fog swirling around the bodies, seemingly attracted to the violence. "The longer we stay in the open, the more we become like them. Your guilt, Faren... it will eat you alive out here."

He looked at Faren, who was shivering on the cobblestones, staring at the woman Aga had killed.

"Your house is gone, Faren," Aga said, not unkindly, but with the hard, cold truth of the forest. "If your family is alive, they are hiding. If they are dead, you cannot help them. But if you stay here, you die. And you die for nothing."

He pointed the tip of the sword toward the heavy iron grate of the sewer access near the fountain. The yellow fog was pouring out of it, thick and cloying, but the scent—the scent of the quarry—was strongest there.

"We go down," Aga commanded. "Under the city. It's the only way to move without fighting half the population."

Gaidan nodded, clutching his arm, his face pale but his eyes clear. "Subterranean transit. Bypass the riots. Tactical. We move."

Elara looked at the dark, fuming grate, then at her pristine instrument, then at the madman smashing the skull of the merchant in the plaza. She looked at the yellow fog curling around her boots.

"Logic dictates... evasion," she agreed, though she looked like she had swallowed a lemon.

Aga grabbed the iron ring of the grate. It was heavy, rusted shut, but adrenaline and the wild magic of the Maw gave him strength. With a grunt, he heaved it open. The metal screeched in protest.

The smell that wafted up was foul—sewage, rot, and damp stone—but beneath it, clear as a bell, was the scent of the Abyss.

And something else.

Aga paused, sniffing the dank air rising from the hole. It was a new scent. Sharp. Metallic. Impossible.

It smelled like... crushed stars.

"Into the hole," Aga said, sheathing the sword and dropping into the darkness. "The hunt continues."