Scout led them down a long stone corridor with no openings. The ceiling was supported by a series of arching supports placed evenly along the corridor; other than that, there was nothing to see until they were close to the end of the corridor.

It was obvious where the corridor ended because multicolored light shone from the opening at the far end. Once they were close enough, Scout stopped and waved for the rest of them to continue. Sophia guessed the android could probably have gone closer, but it was hard to blame her for stopping early when going too far was certain death.

Sophia's attention was on the scene ahead of her. Before the last archway, there were stone walls. After the archway, the walls gave way to stairs flanked by stones that looked like they should have fallen but were somehow held in place by the stairs and an arching door frame. At the top of the arch, multicolored mana looked like it pulsed rather than flowed. The stones above that point seemed to pulse with the mana, moving as it moved.

A blue diamond seemed to shimmer in and out of existence above the peak of the door and a small stream of mana flowed upwards from it; other than that, nothing seemed to escape from the area around the portal.

The floating rocks and crystal seemed to be suspended in a fleck-studded darkness, but Sophia knew that was an illusion created by her manasight. None of that was really there; it was really a wall. It was just hidden by the mana and essence that had leaked from the portal over centuries. There was a lot of mana there, but with how little it moved, Sophia knew that was simply because it had collected over time; more was entering than leaving, but very little was entering.

The fact that there was still room for more said a lot about how little mana was leaking from the damaged portal. It would probably glow for decades, maybe even centuries, after they repaired the portal, but it would eventually fade away.

Inside the doorframe, a pair of connected glares, golden above and blue below, washed out whatever was behind well enough that Sophia could not see what lay on the other side of the portal. All she could sense was that this was mostly mana, but there was definitely a touch of the essence of the Origin about it as well.

"You wanted to be first?" Dav sounded doubtful. He liked to lead the way into dangerous places.

"Yeah." Sophia usually let Dav lead, but this wasn't the time. She was the better person for this. He'd be in moments after she was unless she stepped back immediately, but that still gave her enough time to be certain it wouldn't hurt him more than the travel to the Broken Lands had.

Sophia made her way up the stairs, then stepped into the shimmering mana. It shifted and she stood in another place, just like entering a normal portal.

The other side of the portal was monochromatic, with near-black stone and bluish-white light making the only colors Sophia could see. A glance down at herself made it clear that she was also affected; her normally deeply colored shirt now looked black with blue-white trim that glimmered in the limited light.

Strangely, there was very little feel of the Origin on this side; if anything, it felt less present than it had on the other side. What essence made its way near the portal had to be seeping through and accumulating on the other side, as if it was rejected by this side of the portal.

Sophia relaxed when she felt Dav's warmth behind her. It was safe for him to be here, or at least as safe as it was for her, and his presence was comforting.

"What happened here? It looks like something destroyed half of the … uh, building?" Dav sounded confused as he looked around.

Sophia smiled and followed his gaze. He hadn't yet noticed the colors, but he was probably right to pay more attention to their surroundings. Checking out the mana and essence was her job; his was to focus on other possible threats.

They stood in an old black stone corridor that extended far into the distance. Black supports were set against the walls, but there was no longer a ceiling for them to support. Instead, the walls ended at about head height near the portal and dropped lower and lower the farther down the corridor they were. Lightning danced among clouds at the top of the walls, while the sky above was filled with cold hard points of light.

The sky wasn't supposed to look the way it did; in fact, the interspace conduit was supposed to look like a corridor with a high vaulted ceiling. It was clearly badly damaged, but nothing in what Sophia had said why.

The supporting pillars stood taller than the remaining wall. The nearest pair of pillars seemed intact, at least up to the cap where it shifted to support both an arch and a strange floating circle that looked like it was made of both metal and rock. It was hard to tell if it was built by an intelligence or if it simply gathered into that shape, but Sophia's guess was that if it wasn't built, it was still based on something that had been there before, something created by Issvako. There were just too many smooth curves to think otherwise.

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The end of the circle closest to the portal they'd just entered from was split by soundless white lightning, as was the far end. In the middle, the light seemed to form a target symbol; Sophia thought that perhaps it was simply illuminating a surface at the top of a dome she couldn't see the rest of, but it was hard to be certain.

The lightning on the far end of the circle funneled down through poorly-seen rocks to strike a jagged stone roof between a pair of pillars in the distance. Past those pillars, there was no lightning at all; the only light came from the ground, an irregular if thick white line surrounded by two thin lines.

Closer to Sophia, those lines were clearly formed of gleaming clear crystals. Some sort of black mesh or wire ran down the two outer lines and crossed unevenly over the larger central accumulation of crystals. A few of the crystals looked like they'd been knocked out of place and sat on the narrow ledge at the base of the wall, but most of them seemed to have stayed in the clearly deliberate trio of lines.

Sophia's first thought was that it was a trip hazard. Her second thought was that crystals were often associated with magic; they were easily produced by essence and could hold mana. These crystals didn't seem to be either; they were simply pieces of stone that reflected light.

"This place is strange." Dav's words were clear. They emphasized just how silent their surroundings were. To Sophia's eyes, it looked like she ought to be surrounded by noise, from the lightning if nothing else, but there was no noise that didn't come from the two of them.

"Yeah, but I think it's safe, at least as long as we don't trip," Sophia answered softly. A quick glance at her status told her that she hadn't lost any points of shield, at least not yet. "How's your shield?"

Dav shook his head. "It's fine, but we haven't been here long. Let's head that way. Do you think it's another crack in reality?"

Sophia snorted as she started picking her way carefully across the floor, avoiding both the black wires and the crystals. "Does calling it a crack help?"

"Eh," Dav sounded cheerful as he made his way forward. "It's more fun than just calling it a portal or a doorway. I mean, I can step through a door anywhere. Cracks in reality aren't something you see everyday."

"Do you think a Challenge entrance is a crack in reality? If it is, then yeah, I'd have to say I used to see them almost every day." Sophia grinned at Dav, then winked to take the sting out of her words. "I mean, I grew up inside a dungeon. Aki didn't separate herself from the rest of the world, but she's still a dungeon."

Dav chuckled. "You've had such a weird life. You just say things like that like it's normal. Stepping through cracks in reality to fight monsters? That's a game, not reality. At least, it was until I met you."

"Your life's plenty weird to me too," Sophia joked back. "Come on, you don't think that living in a world half-overrun by nanites is normal, do you? I think dungeons are less weird than that. There are so many different ways to deal with nanites; they aren't exactly very smart!"

"I dunno, it seems pretty common to me. Everyone back home lived there." Dav grinned, then reached out and caught Sophia as her foot caught on one of the wires that was just a little higher than she'd expected. The wire didn't move at all as it almost tripped her; it was like kicking a stone wall rather than a net. "Careful there."

"Yeah." Sophia frowned at the surface below herself for a moment, then shook her head. "Well, we don't have to worry about moving the wires, at least."

Sophia was even more careful about where she put her feet and how high she stepped on each step after that. Even so, she and Dav each caught each other after more than one stumble. It was really not a good surface to walk on at all. That made entirely too much sense; it was designed by someone who could fly, after all.

Sophia expected it to be a relatively short journey; after all, the rock roof that was being hit by lightning didn't look like it was really very far away at all. She was utterly and completely wrong. It took more than fifteen minutes to reach the first pair of pillars. Each subsequent pair took even longer, and while the roof originally looked like it was only three pillars away from them when they started, they didn't reach it until the seventh pair.

Nothing looked different from one step to the next, but it was very obvious that space did not follow the same rules as in the outside world. That was similar to the Origin, but it wasn't responding to the people in it the way the Origin did; instead, it seemed to be invisibly and continually expanding space … or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe the stone walls, pillars and even the webbed stones were there to shorten space and weren't working the way they were supposed to. The conduit was supposed to be broken, after all.

The distance wasn't the only thing that changed every few steps, even though Sophia couldn't see the difference in any single step. The colors stayed the same, but the damaged walls seemed higher or lower than they had been and more or less cracked, while the pillars became open gaping holes in the wall then round columns or intricate stonework. The crystals on the ground and the black lines that covered them were always there, but they weren't always the simple pair of a crystal and solid black stone or metal they were when Sophia and Dav stepped into the conduit. Sometimes the crystal was more like flat plates; other times, it was broken glass. Sometimes the stone or metal lines were merged into the floor; other times, they were tied like cloth.

The sky also changed, though the fact that it was mostly floating rocks, lightning, and fog made it hard to tell if that was the same changes as the ground or simply normal movement.

Only a handful of things definitely didn't change. The mana and essence levels were essentially static and low, even if they did eddy a bit. The colors stayed essentially monochromatic, even when it came to things like Dav's eyes; those looked really odd in black and bluish white. Last, the materials didn't change. The walls were always stone, the crystals were always some sort of shining clear substance, even when they looked glasslike, and there was always lightning in the sky.

It was disconcerting, but at least that was all. It didn't seem dangerous.

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