As they clambered down the steep slope toward the ruined city, Jasper noticed that the flow of chimeras through the gate had almost entirely ceased. At first glance, it seemed a good thing; Jasper doubted the Djinn army had been overwhelmed in the brief time since they had split off from them. Yet, Jasper was equally certain that the blood mage had not gone through all this trouble simply to unleash a few hundred winged fiends. There had to be another threat - just what he wasn't sure - but the thought only added to his urgency as they reached the base of the mountain and searched for a way into the city.

The walls were built for war, two hundred feet tall and nearly a fourth as wide, with massive, wedged-shaped towers jutting out at regular intervals every thousand feet. Given the vast size of the city, Jasper guessed that the walls must have been at least a few dozen miles in length, elevating the numbers needed to man them to truly mindboggling heights.

Unlike the city, which remained largely intact, the walls were scarred by the same craters that pockmarked the mountains. Large sections had been reduced to rubble-filled basins, giving them an easy point of entry into the city. Yet as Jasper reached the edge of the nearest breach, he realized it might not be that easy.

As he paused at the top of the crater, a deep sense of foreboding passed over him. He frowned, scanning the broken rubble and deep, pitted basin for anything to explain the feeling, but found nothing. There were no bodies, no deep shadows, no unexpected movements, and yet… "Maybe we should find another way," he murmured as the others paused beside him. "I feel like…"

"Like everything good in the world has died?" Ihra finished his sentence for him.

"More like I'm going to die if I take another step," he admitted. "I know it's silly, it's just a bunch of rocks, but…"

"I don't think it's silly," Tsia cut in, squinting her eyes as she looked up at the black sun looming above them. "There's a faint echo of essence over those rocks; I don't know what it does, but it feels the same as the blackness covering the sun. And if it's powerful enough to do that to a god-"

"Yeah, I guess we're flying," Jasper said as the group stepped back hastily from the edge.

He quickly cast Spectral Wings on Erin and Samsadur and, after waiting for the spell to lapse, cast again on himself and Ihra. The others had spread out in the street while they waited for them, but they'd quickly abandoned their search when they'd broken through the boarded-up doors and windows to find piles of corpses inside. "At least they didn't rise, but there was something off about the bodies, something dark," the durgu explained as the group started their trek down the silent streets.

The city's gentle, downward slope toward the ocean made it easy to keep track of the massive temple beside the empty sea, but that was about the only positive thing Jasper could say about it.

The city must have once been strikingly beautiful, before the sea had emptied and the mountains been obliterated, and, lending itself to Tsia's hypothesis, he noted a marked resemblance to the architecture of the Djinn's capital. Yet a dark pall hung over the place, for though there were no signs of life, death surrounded them.

Some streets were clogged with black, wizened bodies, all headed in the same direction as if whatever killed them had caught them in the act of fleeing, though the lack of any wounds made it unclear what had killed them. Others appeared to have been cleaned up, with mounds of bodies piled at the corners in orderly rows, indicating that there must have been at least a few survivors.

The worst streets, though, were the ones which had no corpses at all - or so Jasper mistakenly thought until he caught a glimpse through the dust-caked glass of the storefront windows. Bodies were piled up on top of each other like logs, filling the rooms from floor to ceiling, and unlike those in the streets, the wizened corpses inside exuded the same uneasy feeling that the crater had given him. What the hell happened here?

As nobody wished to detour down the many wide boulevards that sliced through their route and search through the homes for loot, they made fast progress toward the possible temple of Nūr, whose magnificence only became clearer as they got closer.

The temple was easily the size of a small town, and encircled by a second set of walls, though far shorter than those that guarded the city. Once upon a time, the temple and its walls had likely been white, but now the stones were stained the same red hue that discolored nearly everything in the city.

Despite that, it remained an impressive sight. The bulk of the enclosure was dominated by a massive complex of basilicas, towers, and halls in a bewildering array of different styles that must have been added over centuries, if not millennia. The heart of the complex, though, was dedicated to a single towering basilica capped with a dulled golden dome so large that it seemed to defy the laws of physics.

The twelve towers encircling the dome were equally impressive. They were, by far, the tallest buildings in the city, closer to a skyscraper in height than any stone construction had any right to be. Each one was capped with a golden roof, studded with brightly colored panes of glass, while faded murals covered the sides facing the city. Jasper could only make out the details on the towers closest to them - towers dedicated to images of rams, stags, and dragons - but it was enough for him to guess that they were consecrated to constellations, gods, or both.

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But as they neared the temple's outer walls, the streets became clogged with corpses, packed so tightly together that it was nearly impossible to pass through them. Afraid of touching the strangely wizened, blackened corpses, they were forced to abandon the street in favor of the rooftops, until the street deadened into a pavilion in front of the temple gates.

A sea of black filled the pavilion, thousands upon thousands of bodies clustered so tightly around the temple's gates that Jasper could barely see the ground beneath them. But the golden doors, covered from top to bottom with bas-relief statues depicting scenes with horned men and a giant bearing a sun on his shoulders, remained closed and given their massive size - near as tall as the walls themselves - he doubted they would have any chance at opening them, even if there wasn't a sea of corpses in between them. Flying it is.

Their progress was halted again as S̆ams̆ādur, Erin, and Tsia flew first, leaving Ihra and himself on the rooftop. But though the roof offered stunning views of the city in all directions, neither had any desire to look. There was a dread that hung over the city, a dread that seemed to sink into their very bones, and the two crouched down in the shadow of the short walls surrounding the roof.

"So this is great," Jasper commented wryly as Ihra nestled close beside him, in an attempt to pull herself completely out of the black sun's rays. "I keep thinking a getaway to the sea would be nice."

He drew a snort of amusement from her, though her smile quickly faded as the two stared at the desolate city sprawled in front of them. "What do you think killed them?"

"Honestly? I'm trying pretty hard not to think about it," Jasper admitted. "Did you see a single wound on them?" he asked.

"A few," her brow furrowed, "but not many. Nothing that would kill'em."

"Some of the streets reminded me of this place back home. Pompeii," he added, scratching his head. "A volcano destroyed the city, burying it in so much ash that the whole place was covered up, and a lot of the people died like this, out in the streets," he gestured to the massive crowd prostrated before the temple gates. "But there's no volcano here that I can see, plus it doesn't explain all the other bodies that are stacked up at the corners or inside the houses."

It also doesn't explain the inexplicable sense of dread emanating from them, he thought, but couldn't quite bring himself to say out loud while surrounded by a sea of corpses.

"I doubt it was anything natural," Ihra replied, shivering as she peered up at the black sun above them. "It's like it's sick, infected with something that spread to the rest of the world."

"Let's hope it doesn't spread to us," he added darkly. "I feel better when we get out of this damned place." As he spoke, he felt Spectral Wings pop back into place, and he quickly twisted his fingers. "Come on, let's get out of here."

The shadowy wings burst from their backs in tandem as the two stood up, but a flicker of motion in the corner of Jasper's eyes caught his attention. "What is that…" He trailed off as he saw the source of the movement.

A thin plume of black now rose from the top of one of the ravaged mountains in the distance. At first, he almost mistook it for a column of smoke and was about to make a sarcastic comment about jinxing themselves with a volcano when the black plume suddenly changed. In a matter of seconds, it exploded in size as hundreds of writhing, wriggling plumes rose from the broken mountain and streaked toward the city - toward them. "Time to run."

Throwing himself off the roof, he dipped low above the pavilion before rising back into the air and swooping up and over the temple walls. Predictably, there was another courtyard beyond the gates, with a large, dried-up lake at its center and rows of larger-than-life statues depicting the sun god and his twelve servants.

He zoomed past them without a glance, as his eyes honed in on Tsia and the others. They'd paused outside a second pair of gates as monolithic as the ones outside, and as he drew close, he could hear them arguing.

"There's no way we can open these doors, lass," the durgu argued. "We need to look for another way in."

"We could if Erin would stop hoarding his essence," the princess fired back. "There's no way these doors are solid metal; there's got to be wood on the inside - right?" she demanded.

"Ye-es," Erin agreed reluctantly, his eyes flitting over to them briefly as Jasper and Ihra touched down, "But I don't know if I can do it. That's a lot of wood - like a boat-sized amount of wood; I don't think I can move it on my own."

"See," S̆ams̆ādur butted in triumphantly. "It's like I said - we should look for another route-"

"We don't have time," Jasper cut him off and pointed to the black tendrils that now filled the sky. "Call me paranoid, but I don't think we want to be outside when those hit, unless you'd like to be part of the decorations."

The three paled, and Erin promptly spun to face the door, stretching out his hands to bend the wood. He staggered back a second later, grasping his temple with a pained yelp.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know. I can feel wood underneath all that metal, but it's...different somehow? It's like it resisted me when I tried to move it."

"Split up then - we need to find another way in fast," Jasper pivoted to a new plan immediately, but Erin took one look at the black quickly blotting out the sky, and shook his head.

"We'll never make it in time. I can do this; I have to."

The doors quivered as he raised his hands again. They'd only creaked a few millimeters before he began to scream as his skin swelled and split open, weeping wounds emerging on every part of his body. Jasper cast Circle of Forgiveness, but no matter how many times he cast it, he could not keep up with the pace of the opening wounds - but then the doors opened wide enough to slip a hand into.

The others raced forward, bracing themselves against the doors as they strained to pull them open, but they were too heavy to budge until Ihra activated the Still Pond. Her face drained of color as she sacrificed a large portion of her health, but the gates creaked open just wide enough to slip through and, grabbing the near-unconscious scout, Jasper and the others ran inside.

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