Charon had made this look effortless. Now, Darren understood that it had never been effortless at all.

  The Pathway of Authority had been chosen.

  Power surged through him, completely foreign to him. This was not magic meant to destroy, like the Divinity of Dissection. Authority was power meant to command. Darren could feel every splinter of its ancient wood, every piece of metal holding it together and even every ripple in the dark waters that sought to swallow it whole. He gritted his teeth, pulling a thin sheen of sweat across his brow. The Ferryman had not been calm, he had simply been accustomed to wielding this power.

  Compared to Charon, Darren was just a novice.

  A sharp, delighted laugh rang out over the deck.

  “Oh, marvelous!” the Wicked Witch whooped, clapping her hands together as the Ferry shuddered violently beneath Darren’s tenuous grip. "Well done!"

  Darren did not have the luxury of responding.

  Because what he was doing now should have been impossible. He had chosen this Path mere seconds ago. The Authority of Hades was not something that bent so easily to one who had no experience wielding it. It required understanding and experience that had taken Charon's lifetimes to master. Darren might not have had experience but what he did have was understanding. Magic, to him, had always been easy to grasp. Scholars in Hiraeth’s Magic Tower had spent decades dissecting its principles, arguing over formulae and theory. But no matter how hard they tried, they would never reach his level of comprehension when it came to the mystic arts.

  He was no master of this newfound power, that would still take time, but for now the Ferry of the Dead held together.

  That was what mattered.

  He exhaled slowly, forcing his heartbeat to steady but it seemed to continue beating hard and fast.

  Another problem was already looming in the distance.

  Darren’s gaze lifted.

  The Gates of the Underworld.

  His eyes widened as he finally took it in. The Ferry of the Dead—an enormous ancient vessel that had transported countless souls whose lives had come to an end—looked like nothing more than a drifting speck before that colossal barrier.

  They were not gates in any conventional sense.

  Instead, what stood before them was a formation, countless hexagons interlocked with flawless precision, forming an immense lattice that curved upward and outward.

  The closer they got, the more detail revealed itself.

  Each hexagon was composed of floating geometric shapes, suspended in perfect alignment. They glowed with a radiant golden light, their edges sharp and clean, their structure immaculate. The entire formation surrounded the Realms of Tartarus in a seamless shell, enclosing everything within.

  It was breathtaking in its scale and terrifying in its purpose.

  Because the Gates were not decorative.

  Darkness pressed against the outer surface like an ocean of ink. It writhed and churned, refusing to be illuminated by the golden brilliance. Black explosions blossomed across the barrier, violent bursts that rippled over the hexagonal lattice in shockwaves of distortion.

  Darren almost thought that they would shatter under the impact.

  But they did not.

  The Gates held true.

  They trembled, flaring even brighter where the darkness struck. The golden light pulsed, reinforcing itself, refusing to yield against the onslaught that similarly refused to cease. He continued to stare at the darkness beyond the Gates, almost in a trance.

  "What is that…?” His voice came out quieter than he intended.

  Suddenly, the Ferry of the Dead lurched violently.

  He felt his attention waver, just for a heartbeat, as the sheer magnitude of what he was witnessing sank in. The ancient vessel called out in as if in warning for him to concentrate. He heard wood groaning and metal shrieking before he hastily tightened his mental grip around the foreign power. He clenched his jaw as he forced the power back into alignment. The strain that Charon had borne for ages was now his to bear if he wanted to get them out of this alive.

  Darren exhaled sharply and turned toward Marianne. But the words died in his throat.

  For the first time since her awakening, her smile had faded.

  The Witch of Humanity stood utterly still, her eyes fixed upon the Gates.

  If she had heard his whispered question, she gave no sign of it. But someone else was more than eager to give him an answer.

  “Those symbols that you see, of which the Gates are made out of, are called Runes.” The System seemed calm even as the chaos unfolded all around them.

  “They are the Written Language of Magic. The most advanced version of this Language remains to be the one constructed by—”

  Merlyn faltered.

  The sentence trailed off into silence, as though a page had been torn from its memory. The omission hung there, incomplete.

  Darren barely noticed it because that was not what he had been asking. What the Gates were made out of did not matter to him nor did he care who had created the written language of magic. The question faded into irrelevance as the Ferry began closing the distance between them and the Gates at an alarming rate, dragged forward as if by an invisible force. They loomed larger and larger, golden light reflecting across the dark waters like a second sun.

  The Wicked Witch of Humanity seemed enraptured like he himself had been by what those barriers were trying to keep out.

  Seconds.

  That was all they had before collision.

  Their survival was up to him now.

  Whatever those Gates were made of, whatever magical script formed their structure, it did not matter.

  All would be cut down by his magic.

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  Darren rose to his feet.

  The Authority of Hades remained anchored to the Ferry, maintaining its cohesion through Darren's sheer will.

  Simultaneously, he reached for something familiar; a power that he knew well. This power was one that he had mastered.

  The Divinity of Dissection answered his call.

  Red magical energy gathered along his arms like a second pulse, eager and precise. In a way, its power was based in a foundation that was the complete opposite of the one that he had gained through becoming the Champion of Hades.

  His Divinity's fundamental principle was that all things could be torn apart.

  Including the Gates of the Underworld.

  Magical energy surged upward from his core, feeding both powers at once. The strain it put on both his body and his mind was immediate. The Pathway he had chosen demanded stability while his Divinity demanded incision. The dual pull of the two mystic arts made his vision blur at the edges, but he did not give in.

  Then—

  A hand touched his shoulder.

  Marianne stood beside him, her expression still serious, shaking her head.

  Darren frowned. “We don’t have time—”

  “You’ve done your part, Sword of Avalon,” she interrupted.

  Sword of—?

  “Avalon?” he echoed faintly. What was she talking about?

  But the Wicked Witch was already stepping past him.

  “Now,” Marianne continued, that familiar wicked grin curling back onto her lips, “let me do mine.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, golden eyes gleaming, not with madness, but with excitement.

  “Trust me.”

  There was no reason why he should do so. She may have been strong but strength alone would not get them out of this.

  But still, he did.

  He trusted her.

  Darren did not understand why. He did not understand the title she had given him, nor the confidence that radiated from her as the Gates bore down upon them.

  So he focused on playing his part.

  The Authority of Hades tightened around the Ferry once more as he poured his focus into maintaining its integrity, the waters of the Underworld turning more violent than ever before. It was this power alone that held the ship together now, keeping its hull from splintering and breaking apart under the pressure, to prevent its ancient frame from collapsing as the pull intensified. But he could not control its direction. The vessel trembled violently now, pulled forward by an invisible gravity emanating from the Gates themselves.

  The golden grid expanded across his entire field of vision, brilliance reflecting off Marianne’s dark silhouette as she moved to the front of the ship. The Wicked Witch of Humanity stood at the prow of the Ferry of the Dead, facing the impossible barrier without a single trace of fear in her expression.

  The gravity of the Gates continued to drag them forward.

  But she was going to change that.

  She raised her hand.

  The gesture was simple but the air around her began to change in response. Darren felt it even while maintaining his grip on the Authority of Hades.

  Power recognized power. And Marianne Elarion possessed it in abundance.

  Her General Level was high, the System had stated that much plainly. But those were simply crude measurements. There were individuals whose capabilities could not be reduced to statistics or formulas. She was one of them: Anomalies. Just like Darren, Marianne was beyond such crude quantification. Her destructive potential could not be properly assessed. Wood sprouted from nothingness itself—fibers weaving together midair, twisting and thickening with impossible speed, bark sealing along its length. The growth matured in seconds, stretching upward until she held it in front of her.

  It was a staff, longer than she was tall and perfectly straight.

  Then, golden light burst outward.

  It surged from the staff in a controlled eruption, identical in hue to the brilliance emanating from the Gates ahead.

  He gasped as understanding dawned on him.

  The Gates were made of Runes, the Written Language of Magic.

  Just like the System had said.

  The single limitation of the Runic Language was simple. It was constrained only by one’s understanding of it.

  Complexity determined capability.

  For most, that limitation would always be present no matter how fluent one was in said language.

  For Marianne Elarion, that limitation did not exist.

  The System had gone quiet for there was no point in trying to attempt and quantify what was unfolding before his very eyes. It could not calculate destructive potential when the variables themselves were being rewritten.

  The Gates reacted instantly in response.

  Golden symbols shimmered, destabilized, then shattered apart into fragments of glowing glyphs.

  Then, they were remade.

  All it took were seconds as runic arrangements were undone and reassembled under Marianne’s control, their formation shifting faster than the eye could follow. Symbols flew past the Ferry in brilliant arcs, rewritten and restructured midair. Even the greatest runemasters—those who had dedicated lifetimes to deciphering this language—would not have been capable of what Darren was now witnessing.

  The barrier bent.

  It curved outward, reshaping itself just as the Ferry of the Dead reached its surface.

  The collision never came.

  Instead, the Gates folded around them.

  Golden hexagons warped and stretched, wrapping across the vessel like liquid light. The Ferry pressed forward as the barrier yielded, reshaped into something new. Darren maintained the the Authority with gritted teeth, feeling the strain as the River’s pull intensified one final time.

  “Darren!” Marianne’s voice cut sharply through the roar of magic.

  He understood instantly.

  The Ferry surged forward and then there was nothing beneath it. They sailed off the edge of the Underworld. The Rivers of the Underworld vanished behind them as the vessel launched into open air, the defined boundary of Tartarus dropping away into an endless abyss.

  For a fraction of a second, gravity claimed them.

  Darren roared.

  The Ferry shuddered violently as he forced it to obey a new command.

  Fly.

  The ancient vessel groaned in protest but complied, suspended in empty expanse as though the air itself had become water.

  Around them, the Gates completed Marianne’s design.

  A portion of the barrier—carefully carved from the greater whole—encased the Ferry in a massive sphere of golden runes. It detached smoothly, like a vesicle separating from a living membrane, forming a protective bubble torn free from a greater structure.

  Behind them, the Gates sealed instantly.

  Hexagons fused together with seamless precision, reforming before even a sliver of darkness could slip through. The Underworld was whole again, impenetrable and contained. And they were no longer within it.

  Darren stared as the Underworld receded into the distance.

  This was it.

  The true beginning of their journey.

  He should have felt triumphant. Perhaps even relief that they were still alive or excitement at the fact that he was now one step closer to fulfilling his bargain.

  One step closer to seeing his family again.

  But none of those emotions arose in him.

  Because what stretched before them was not the Lands of the Living. That life that once defined these realms had been lost long ago. All he could see now was devastation and ruin.

  Marianne continued to stand at the prow, her staff planted firmly onto the deck of the ship, golden light reflecting in her eyes as she gazed ahead. That was why her smile had faded. Because she had known all along what awaited them beyond the Gates of the Underworld.

  “Welcome,” she declared calmly, “to the Lands of the Lost.”