They reached the Sunken City on the third day.
It wasn't what Lee expected. He'd imagined ruins crumbled walls, broken towers, the skeletons of great buildings reaching toward an uncaring sky. Instead, the city was intact. Perfectly preserved. A metropolis of black steel and white stone, its spires still gleaming, its streets still cobbled, its windows still lit with a soft, amber glow.
The only problem was that it was upside down.
The city hung from the ceiling of a vast underground cavern a inverted metropolis whose foundations pointed toward the sky and whose towers plunged toward the abyss below. The buildings were held in place by chains of condensed shadow, each link as thick as a man's waist, each one humming with a power that made Lee's teeth ache.
"How..." Taro breathed.
"The Shattering didn't just destroy the city," the Pilgrim said. "It inverted it. Dragged it down into the earth and turned it inside out. The Sunken City is a wound in reality. A place where the laws of physics go to die."
"How do we get in?" Kira asked.
The Pilgrim pointed to a chain that descended from the inverted city's highest tower a chain that stretched down, down, down into the darkness below.
"We climb."
They climbed for six hours.
The chain was cold against Lee's hands colder than steel had any right to be. It felt alive, pulsing with a slow, steady rhythm like a heartbeat. Every few minutes, the chain would shudder, and Lee would feel something pass beneath him. Something vast. Something that was swimming through the darkness like a whale through water.
Don't look down, Onyx Tempest advised.
Lee looked down.
He wished he hadn't.
The darkness below wasn't empty. It was full. Full of shapes that moved and changed and never quite resolved into anything recognizable. Full of lights that weren't lights colors that didn't exist, sounds that had no source, smells that made him remember things that had never happened.
I said don't look down.
"I wanted to see."
And what did you see?
Lee thought about it. "The bottom," he said finally. "There's a bottom. It's far. But it's there."
That's not what most people see.
"What do most people see?"
Themselves. Their fears. Their regrets. Their desires. The darkness below the Sunken City is a mirror. It shows you what you're most afraid of finding.
"And what did it show me?"
The sword was quiet for a long moment.
I don't know, it admitted. That's what worries me.
They reached the city's entrance a gateway shaped like a screaming face, its mouth wide enough to swallow a house. The Pilgrim stepped through first, his ordinary face set in grim determination. The others followed, one by one.
Lee was the last to enter.
As he crossed the threshold, he felt something change. The mark on his chest blazed to life not with heat, but with cold. A cold so intense it felt like fire. And for just a moment, he saw something in the gateway's stone face.
A reflection.
Not of himself.
Of someone else. Someone with eyes like burning coals and a smile like a knife wound. Someone who looked at Lee with recognition not warmth, not hatred, but something far more complicated.
Brother, the reflection seemed to say. Finally.
Then the moment passed, and Lee was inside the Sunken City, and the gateway closed behind him with a sound like a coffin lid shutting.
"Welcome," the Pilgrim said quietly, "to the place where dreams go to die."
"Or be born," Ren added.
The Pilgrim looked at him. "Same thing, in this place."
They began to walk.
And somewhere, in the depths of the inverted city, something began to laugh.