His first successful attempt at Dream Divination, marked in the Ars Goetia as the "least dangerous" ritual, had delivered him directly into an abyssal abyss.
He did not pass over the threshold of consciousness; he was pulled across a shimmering, ink-dark river of liquid starlight and tar, where the reflection of a reality he did not recognize glittered like broken glass.
Above him, floating not on the water but suspended in the spectral air, was a ghostly fleet. They were massive, silent galleons and ships with skeletal rigging and sails woven from green, spectral fire. They looked like... pirates? A phantom armada that sailed the boundary between worlds, lit by an unseen, internal glow that cast no heat.
A bearded pirate that looked like captain noticed him.
He was not permitted to watch for long.
A gravitational force, not of this world, sucked him forward, accelerating him toward a towering, monumental mountain range that defined the horizon. As he breached the peaks, the landscape that opened up below him—revealed like a vast island well surrounded by these endless mountains—stripped away any remaining academic skepticism.
The islands, seen from above, appeared as a labyrinth with no discernible borders, curving and twisting into an eternal abyss. At the very center of this labyrinthine valley stood a conical spire, a mountain peak that tapered to a point, its base surrounded by the chaotic geometry of the labyrinth itself.
Faust saw the monumental stone arches—pillars with heavy headers—lining the edges of the valley floor.
Massive, thick iron chains were slung between these arches, anchoring the structures against the abyssal winds. Below the arches, rivers of vibrant, liquid fire—arteries of molten lava—ran like glowing veins through the dark, volcanic ground.
Above, the sky was a dramatic clash of colors: deep, dark, bloody-red clouds at the zenith, separated from a lighter, foggier band at the lower level by an edge of lightning-lashed storm.
This was Hell.
The Wunderkammer's description of the lower spheres had not been poetry.
He was descending, pulled toward the central spire, when a new sensation, distinct from the dream's gravity, ripped through him.
His heart—or perhaps one of his other, hidden circulatory systems—skipped a beat.
It wasn't fear of the landscape; it was a physical reaction to another being's aura, an impulse that felt instantly familiar and utterly dangerous.
He woke, gasping, sweat pooling under his black skin.
Wunder's snores continued above him.
Morning sun, thin and gray, leaked through the wagon seams.
The doubt immediately surfaced.
Was it just his mind? A projection of everything he had read? Could a mind produce such monumentally structured, alien geometry?
The answers generated only more existential dread.
If that was the "safest" divination, what did the others yield?
The accuracy of the Ars Goetia's Bestiary felt undeniable now.
The descriptions of beasts and powers were true, probably.
And if the landscape was true...
He pressed a hand to his chest, the phantom reaction to the aura lingering.
His original questions had multiplied.
What was his connection to that place? Why did his nature resonate so violently with that geometry?
He was Mephistopheles.
He was Faust.
But who—and what—were his parents, that their child was welcomed by the very logic of the abyss?