Syrano’s ice block of a foot drove into Taric’s stomach, forcing his aching lungs into action.

Gasping, Taric gagged on the air, thick with sweet flowers and sour fruit. The sudden flood overwhelmed his taxed senses, while a crawling sensation writhed behind his back. It felt as if he were trying to breathe a mist of sticky nectar.

His eyes flared open to a violently purple sky, thick clouds roiling with swirls of deep blue and sick green. A break in the cloud cover revealed the shining silver spires of a city floating in the thick morass.

Taric’s entire body instantly tightened in panic. He bolted upright, fingers closing over the blessedly solid handle of his dagger. An anchor for his reality.

Underhill. Taric’s head snapped around, taking in the rolling motion of the landscape. The crawling feeling had been the bruised flowers of the thicket trying to escape his crushing weight. The broken blossoms moaned piteously, weeping red droplets from their snapped stems.

“Mortals and your iron armor,” Syrano snarled. “You fool. Did you think you could cross over easily with so much metal? Did you not think that the shoes would cause difficulty enough, but yet you cling to your primitive protections? Idiot.”

Taric looked up at him blankly, pulling himself back from the black spiral. He glanced down, following Syrano’s glare of disgust, and noticed a sheen of metal peering from his twisted shirt. Taric quickly tugged the fabric back into place, hiding the telltale. Iron armor? After a fashion, he supposed.

Syrano drew back his foot for another kick.

Taric lunged, moving on reflex before he registered what the corner of his eye had caught. His iron dagger slammed into the black earth before Syrano’s foot. The winter fae caught himself, stumbling back a step. 

Taric twisted the blade and the small night crawler squealed as it died. The wriggling thing looked like an ugly, eyeless lizard with black clustered teeth and slick, oily black scales. Less than the length of Taric’s hand from nose to tail tip. A baby. Its poison wouldn’t be potent enough to kill yet, but it could sicken even a fae.

Taric held up the dagger so Syrano could see it. “I’ll take my primitive protections over your opinion of my intellect.”

Lip twisting in revulsion, Syrano clutched the halter of his polar bear, surveying the ground as if it were suddenly covered in slime. Taric grinned at Syrano’s dismay, lowering his estimation of the winter fae’s age even further. Either that, or he’d been living a very sheltered life. Possibly both. 

Breathing a little easier already, Taric flicked the small corpse off his dagger and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe down the blade. “Haven’t spent much time on the ground, have you?” Ironic, that a human iron warrior would know more about the ever-volatile lands of Underhill than a fae. “Always watch your feet. Or you’ll lose a toe.” He rapped the knee of his prosthetic. “Or more.”

 Syrano kicked him in the prosthetic shin.

“Ouch!” Taric automatically flinched, then had to laugh at the absurdity because all he’d felt was the jolt against his stump.

While Syrano remounted, Taric checked the alignment of his prosthetic. Despite the fall and the passage through the Veil, it seemed to have held together darn well. He still checked all of the joints, just in case. Nothing loosened, nothing twisted. Good enough to carry on.

“If you’ve finished wriggling in the dirt, shuffle your feet.” Syrano looked down his nose from the height of the saddle. “I have no time for your games, human.” 

He could bluster all he wanted. Taric knew the winter fae wouldn’t be leaving him behind. A bargain was a bargain.

Taric gingerly got himself onto his feet. The new prosthetic made the process noticeably easier. He should have thought to make a redesign ages ago.

Taric dusted himself off and carefully stretched, groaning. Neither his body nor his augmentations seemed to have taken any serious damage in the crossing. Though his muscles disagreed with his assessment. 

His entire torso felt like raw pulp. His skin was the swollen red of a severe sun poisoning. His lungs still weren't convinced that the thick soup air was safe to breathe.

Still. He felt a familiar prickling along his spine. A heightened awareness. A keen understanding that what once was, now was not. Anything could happen in Underhill.

Perhaps even miracles.

Syrano kept his polar bear steady as Taric awkwardly hauled himself back up into the saddle behind him. The polar bear chuffed as if its master’s annoyance was catching.

The polar bear kicked up a gold dust as it followed a faint road. The road intersected with another, this one glowing a faint purple. As the polar bear set foot on the conjoined road, Taric felt a push against his chest – a sullen protest of the gate’s enchantments – and abruptly they broke into a forest of fiery birches, their pale, slim trunks in straight regimented lines that never occurred in mortal lands. 

The orange and yellow flaming leaves fluttered angrily at the intruders, but after a handful of the polar bear’s loping strides, the landscape changed again into rolling meadow. The strange grasses shifted colors with the movements of the chaotic wind, parting before the bear’s paws. A thorny vine made halfhearted efforts to break the road’s protections, but a small puff of glittering dust turned it away. Roads were always safe. It was one of Underhill’s few universal rules. To leave the road was foolish. But also, eventually, inevitable. 

Unrestricted by the need for fixed gates, the faery prince and his human passenger skipped from road to road in a dizzying succession of momentary glimpses, staying in each demi-realm mere strides before transferring to another. If Underhill were the netted strands of a necklace, each realm a shining gem, the roads were the strings that held the whole together.

Syrano navigated the tangled web of shifting roads and ever changing realms with confidence, clearly knowing his path well. Yet as more colored strands of road began to braid into the ribbon beneath the polar bear’s paws, a growing tension radiated from the tautness of his posture. Until -

“Prepare yourself,” Syrano snapped.

The road turned to shining obsidian, the bear’s claws clicking. 

Taric pulled in a deep breath, anticipating that the palace would have protections.

It did, but it was nothing like what Taric assumed.

As they crossed the threshold onto the palace grounds, instead of a crushing pressure, tiny, invisible hands ran all over him. They counted Taric’s every hair and checked each thread in his clothes, dancing across his eyelashes and making him blush. His metal evoked a thousand tiny chitters of disapproval, but he evidently passed inspection because Taric felt nothing but the sensation of being given a thorough chiding. He was deemed not dangerous.

Taric ran a hand through his hair, feeling distinctly ruffled, but the only thing that had gone missing was his dagger. He felt a flash of anxiety, but he couldn’t linger on the loss.

Before him rose the palace of the Eldritch King.