The distance across the plain was deceptive.
From where he'd landed it had looked manageable. A long run, certainly, but the kind of distance that had a visible end to it.
He had been running for what felt like a considerable amount of time and the mountain had not gotten meaningfully closer, the cave mouth still a dark smudge against the grey rock face, the twin peaks still rising at what seemed like the exact same distance they had been when he started.
'Everything in this place is an illusion,' he decided. 'Or enchanted. Possibly both. I'm going with both.'
He ran anyway. There was nothing else to do.
He settled back into the rhythm of absorbing spirit energy while moving, the dual focus coming easier now than it had in the stunted forest. Practice, apparently, worked even in a spirit realm. He filed that away as potentially useful information and kept running.
His thoughts wandered the way they did when his legs were handling things on their own.
He thought about the cave mouth and what might be inside it. He thought about Kaz, the actual Kaz, the true spirit form rather than the projection built from borrowed shadow and fog.
The projection alone had been enough to put him on all fours at thirty percent. He had absolutely no framework for what the real thing might look like and was beginning to think that was probably for the best.
'One problem at a time,' he told himself. 'Get to the mountain. Find the prison. Figure out the rest when you get there.'
Then the world warped.
It happened between one stride and the next, with no warning and no transition.
One moment he was running across the open plain with the mountain still far ahead. The next, he was standing at its base with the cave mouth forty feet above him and the rock face close enough to touch.
Grey blinked.
He was quite shocked. There was the unknown force that brought him down and now space warping?
'Everything in this small world might really be an illusion or perhaps enchanted'
Grey would've tried to understand the mysteries of this strange world but he was short on time and he had to fulfill his purpose for coming here.
He looked up at the cave mouth and then at what surrounded it, and stopped.
He had not noticed them from across the plain. He wasn't sure how, because up close they were enormous and impossible to miss, but somehow the distance had hidden them entirely until this moment.
Bat statues. Carved directly into the mountain wall, lining both sides of the cave entrance in rows that stretched as far as he could see in either direction.
Every one of them identical, same wingspan, same folded claws, same knowing eyes cut from the grey stone with a precision that had no business existing in what was supposedly a prison.
Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe more, the rows continuing up the rock face and disappearing into the height of the mountain above.
Grey stared at them for a while.
Then he looked further along the rock face and realised the carvings didn't stop at the cave entrance. They covered the entire mountain. Or most of it.
Enormous bat forms rendered in the stone at every scale, some the size of his hand and some the size of houses, covering every flat surface with the kind of comprehensive dedication that spoke to a very specific relationship with one's own image.
'He carved himself,' Grey realised. 'He carved himself into an entire mountain. Multiple times. At multiple sizes.'
He walked slowly along the base of the mountain, running his hand over the nearest figures.
The workmanship was extraordinary. Every detail was perfect, down to the texture of the fur and the individual joints of the wings, rendered in stone with a patience and skill that Grey, who had never carved anything more ambitious than his name into a tree trunk, could not fully comprehend.
'He's actually good,' he thought, with genuine surprise. 'Like, genuinely good. This is pure art.'
He stopped at one of the larger figures and looked at it properly. The eyes, cut from what looked like crimson stone worked into the grey stone, stared back at him with an expression that was somehow both imperious and lonely.
The wings were folded but not at rest, tension built into the stone as though the figure was one moment away from opening them fully.
Grey looked at it for a long moment.
'You've been here a long time, haven't you,' he thought, not quite directing it at Kaz, not quite directing it at the carving. Just the thought of Kaz sitting there in the quiet of the base of the mountain for millennia.
He stepped back and looked up at the cave mouth forty feet above.
'Alright,' he thought. 'Up we go.'
He climbed.
The rock was dry and cold under his hands, the surface rough enough to grip easily. His spirit form moved with the same lightness and ease it had shown throughout the Heartlands, and the forty feet went quickly, his fingers finding holds without much difficulty.
He passed the carved bat figures on the way up, running his hand briefly across each one, and tried not to think too hard about the fact that he was climbing toward the prison cell of a Great Titan that could hear his thoughts.
He reached the cave mouth and pulled himself up onto the ledge.
The entrance was large. Much larger than it had looked from the ground, tall enough that something with a considerable wingspan could pass through it comfortably.
The interior beyond it was dark but not completely, a faint sourceless light reaching just far enough to show him stone walls, a jagged ceiling, a dusty floor. It had the quality of a space that had not been occupied in a very long time and had stopped expecting anyone.
He walked in.
The sound of the plain outside fell away the moment he crossed the threshold, replaced by the particular silence of enclosed stone. His footsteps raised small clouds of dust with each step.
The cave was wide and deep, stretching back further than the light could comfortably reach, and it was empty except for the dust and the carved figures that continued on the walls in here too, smaller than the ones outside but no less detailed.
'Even in his own prison,' Grey thought. 'Even in here.'
He almost felt sorry for the bat.
Almost.
At the far end of the cave, just visible in the dim light, stood a pair of double doors.
Stone, like the rest of the mountain, but worked into something that no longer looked like raw rock. A bat had been carved across both panels, its wings spread wide from one edge to the other, its body centred on the join between them.
The eyes were crimson stone, the same as the figures outside, and they caught the faint light and held it in a way that made them look uncomfortably alive.
The detail of the carving was finer than anything else he had seen, the individual feathers of the wings rendered with a precision that made the ones outside look like rough drafts.
Grey stood in front of the doors and looked at them for a moment.
'This is it,' he thought. 'Whatever is behind here, this is what you came for. You jumped off a cliff for this. You ran through a horde of spirit beasts for this. You got emotionally ambushed by ghost humanoids for this. You are not stopping now.'
He closed his eyes, because the carved eyes in the crimson stone were doing something to his composure that he didn't want to examine too closely, and pressed both hands flat against the doors.
He pushed slowly.
The stone moved. Slowly at first, a deep grinding resistance, the sound of it rolling through the empty cave and back again, and then with increasing ease as something on the other side gave way. He pushed until the gap was wide enough to walk through and stopped.
He opened his eyes.
He walked through the doors.
And stopped.
The room beyond was vast, far larger than the cave outside had any right to contain, its ceiling disappearing into darkness above and its walls curving away on either side into distance. The sourceless light was stronger here, enough to see by, enough to make out what occupied the centre of the space.
Grey stood very still and looked at it.
His mouth opened.
"There's no way," he muttered.