Had it not been for their armour taking the brunt of the force, the revolving door of environments alone might’ve already killed them. Hail, heat and impenetrable haze were the familiar threats—the real danger came from places warped by the dying throes of the Queen’s magic.

  The very forests were hostile, drunk off a powerful concentration of Aether, while elsewhere, the very mountain ranges themselves morphed within the blink of an eye.

  The worst was the chilling cold, their only source of warmth a ball of purple energy Iris balanced between her fingers. Each hellscape lasted a few minutes at most—sometimes even as short as a few seconds—but riding through them one after another took its toll.

  “Team eight, you’re ahead of everybody else by the looks of it. About to cross the inner search threshold. Find what we’re looking for, and everyone gets to get out of here early.”

  Their Deity’s eye certainly made it sound easy, but it was true. Days had passed in the real world—with all certainty now out of the window, too much delay and at worst, they could come back to a city under siege.

  The ‘inner search threshold’, whether by coincidence or planned beforehand, was more than an arbitrary perimeter. Before them rose a faint blue borderline; both its size and distance hard to truly judge.

  “It’s all clear ahead at your altitude,” the Deity’s Eye said. “In fact, I think it might be familiar territory.”

  They crossed the barrier, and for once in what felt like an eternity, Iris felt her shoulders relaxing. The wind whistled in the crooks of her helmet; the sound of rustling leaves a pleasant undertone to their journey.

  The Queen’s forest: the last remnants of a bygone era.

  “Don’t let up,” Evalyn said, still trailing their mount with sweeping vines. “We still haven’t found anything.”

  “I know,” Iris said. “It’s just…”

  “I get it,” she cooed. “Maybe even more than you do.”

  Iris angled her beast’s nose deeper, its puppet strings loosening around its snout ever so slightly and bringing them in line with the forest’s canopy. No light shone through the breaks in the foliage. Just a dark void of a forest floor.

  “Team 8 to Deity’s Eye,” Evalyn shouted into her radio.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “If this part of her Majesty’s forest is as it was, her body might still be here, over.”

  “Copy. It’s worth a thought. I’ll pass it on to headquarters, over.”

  “Over and out.”

  Another thing to look out for, although Iris didn’t like the thought of finding the Queen first. After a sight like that, going back to her mission would be too tall an order.

  Flying above the canopy of a place she’d only ever seen from the inside was humbling—it had always felt so infinite from the inside, and now, seeing the forest for the trees, it somewhat still did. Only now it felt entirely wrong. So utterly different.

  Her world had once been one underneath the Queen’s canopy, like Crestana had once only known her room, Evalyn the fear her father instilled, Elliot the safety of apathy. Another boundary of what Iris thought constituted reality, rules and safety, was peeled back. By now, it was one too many, and only a matter of time before current reality fell away too.

  It was all surreal; even the past she once thought was set in stone now felt like a fantasy.

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  Everything was malleable, even what felt eternal.

  “There’s something,” Evalyn said, catching Iris off guard and bringing her beast to an abrupt stop. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s definitely not foliage.”

  “Where?” Iris asked, and Evalyn pointed into the distance. Iris thought she could make out a glade sitting just beyond Evalyn’s index finger, a tear in the canopy surface rather than a simple break.

  “The forest floor feels different too. Easier for my roots to dig through.”

  “Let Deity know.”

  “Will do. Get us there for now.”

  Iris obliged, leaning her body towards their destination. The puppet strings tugged, and in turn her beast followed. Evalyn called the investigation in as Iris brought them even closer to the sea of leaves. The tear widened on their approach, with less canopy to obscure its true limits.

  First, the leaves under her feet grew wilted, like a malaise had sapped them of life. The black tint overtaking the turquoise spread from the outermost leaves inward as they drew nearer to the epicentre, quickly overtaking entire branches, and then entire trunks.

  Iris slowed as it worsened. Trees had lost their leaves, branches, and shrivelled into ashy, hollow snags, the forest floor coated in a suffocating layer of dead foliage.

  “It doesn’t look like fire,” Evalyn muttered. “It looks like old age.”

  Iris dipped under the canopy line, coasting between scraggly, web-like branches as Evalyn gave her simple lefts and rights like a game of hot and cold, while her golden maple roots trailed languidly behind them.

  “Here,” she finally said, and Iris halted. The brush beneath their feet looked no different from everywhere else, but she descended the final few feet and felt the welcome sensation of solid ground against her boots.

  For a moment, she tried to find the sensation again, the feeling that the world her Majesty had laid out for her, for her family, could still hold reality within it. But the canopy no longer existed; what watched her from above wasn’t a ceiling of leaves teasing a simple, starry sky, but a mess of worlds past and future, infinite possibilities, none of them familiar. That was yet another thing to mourn the loss of.

  “Here,” Evalyn said, a small trail of roots leading them through their last steps.

  And at the end of it indeed lay a corpse.

  “Team Eight to Deity. We’ve found ourselves a corpse, over.”

  “Copy, Team Eight. Describe the body over.”

  “Body matches the description of a deceased Treyatasian Featherfoot. Highly likely this is Rayak Silverlink, over.”

  The Deity seemed to hesitate in their response. In that moment, Iris felt the same weight bear down on her shoulders as well.

  “Copy,” the Deity’s Eye said. “Search the area. I’ll let headquarters know—direct a cleanup crew to your location to confirm the find, over.”

  “Copy. Over and out.”

  Evalyn’s shoulders relaxed underneath her armour, and her eyes fell to the dead creature, lying half-immersed in wilted leaves.

  “Could you check for an Aether pull? You’d be better at it than I am in a place like this.”

  Iris shook her head. “Nothing. I already checked.” Evalyn simply nodded and exhaled through her nose, as though rattling a sigh out of it.

  “Okay,” she said, pausing for a moment. Her mask concealed her expression, but the knightly visage, free of human imperfection, seemed aptly solemn for the sight before them.

  Eventually, she shook her head. “Part of me thinks they couldn’t have done it. Something about them…too innocent.”

  “Someone tricked her into it,” Iris said with a conviction she didn’t quite know the origin of, but something in her knew it to be true. Perhaps it was a budding sense of intuition—a particularly morbid variety.

  “Na?ve belief. See too much of it, don’t we?” Evalyn muttered before finally turning away. “Let’s see if we can find anything close by.”

  Iris stayed by the body’s side, crouched down and swept away some leaves. Canine, but barely. The only scratches defiling it looked congruent with a fall, probably from an upright position. Nothing that denoted harm.

  No sign of Aether.

  No sign of Aether. None at all. Spirit bodies evolved to retain Aether like humans and blood. Unless she was missing a substantial gash on the flank face-down in the dirt, there should have been some residual Aether left. Only a handful of hours had passed in the Queen’s realm, after all.

  “Iris,” Evalyn called. “Come here.”

  Iris stood and shuffled the short distance towards Evalyn, dragging her feet through the dead foliage. Evalyn was crouched by a dead thicket, parsing through skeletal branches and snapping handfuls at a time.

  Iris bent down, peering over her shoulder. She’d caught something all but lost to the forest, everything but a single, distinctly geometric corner jutting out of the dead leaves. Evalyn brushed them away, her gauntlet running over the leather finish of a briefcase. Brown, scuffed from what might’ve been regular use.

  A briefcase.

  “Iris…”

  “Maybe,” she muttered. She never caught the briefcase itself, only its previous owner. “But I don’t know.”

  “It has to be,” Evalyn hissed. “What else could it be?”

  Her desperate fingers found the briefcase’s edges and pulled it from its resting place. The buckles were underneath her thumbs, their metal latches creaking underneath not Evalyn’s strength, but her hesitation, wavering at what must’ve been the same thought as Iris.

  How could this get any worse?