Magie bolted upright in her bedroll, soaking wet and cold. Iza sat beside her, holding an empty bucket. Magie couldn’t speak, her heart threatened to burst and she wheezed painfully, reeling and thrashing.

“You’re safe now. Take a moment to compose yourself, Moonflower. Nightmares become real; you’ve taken your first step into the Malformation,” Iza told her.

Magie couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. All she could do was tremble uncontrollably.

“That’s the power of the Malformation?! What in the name of all science is it?” Mr. Shade asked. Through the fabric of the tent the day shone bright.

“The Malformation is a dark and evil place all fear to tread. A distorted and perverse part of Evnyance where dreams are twisted into unspeakable horrors. It’s said to be where Phallun first crawled out from. Stay out of the shadows. This journey will be like none you’ve embarked thus far,” Iza told them in a tone unlike any superficial saccharin she’d previously used.

“You’re not coming with us?” Mr. Shade asked.

“I’d not step foot in the Malformation for all the wealth in the world, besides, I have a hair appointment. But Magie’s soul rests there, that I know for certain. In a place known as the rail yard. If she is to survive, she’ll have to brave it,” Iza shook her head.

Magie rocked back and forth. Finally she caught her breath. “It felt so real, the pain, every sensation was magnified a thousand fold! I dreamed that Oth and Foranga were draining my blood! W-what was that? Why would I dream such a thing?” she stuttered.

“The Malformation has a way of penetrating you, reaching deep inside to unearth your darkest, deepest nightmares. It’s hunting you now. Alas this was the only way to transcend its unholy bounds. You’ve made a link and can now follow it strait into the belly of the beast,” Iza said.

“Is the Malformation sentient?” Magie asked.

“In a way; it feeds on its hapless victims. Some believe that all nightmares flow through it.”

“I have to go, don’t I? There’s no other way to retrieve my soul,” Magie sat in a fetal position with her hands on her knees. Her heart still raced and a stinging sensation felt as if a gash really was made through her chest.

“My scans do indicate that to be the case. Don’t worry, I’ll be there with you even if Iza sees herself unfit to join us,” Mr. Shade said.

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you knew the Malformation’s true nature. I’ve seen it, felt it and swore never to again. Besides, I’d only encumber you. But if you do survive, and I know you will, I’ll be scouting the Lotus Preeminence. Another vault is hidden there. For now, I’ve brought you as far as I can; the rest is up to you,” Iza brushed open the flap of the tent.

“I understand,” Magie replied. She pulled down the collar of her robes to check her chest. Nothing. No injuries or bleeding. It felt so real; she couldn’t blame Iza for being afraid. Magie herself was terrified but ready to face her fears. A little older and wiser with each recovered shard.

After some preparation, Magie set out. The sun hung untimely low on the horizon over a dusty badlands of rich, clay red dirt.

“Remember, it’s hunting you. Always remain in the light. All you need to do now is follow the tracks,” Iza left her with these words and a path of wooden planks connecting steel rails. The rail yard.

Magie walked, ready for anything yet nothing happened. She followed the somber rails, a lonely trek, on into the setting sun. Yet it never set. A rich, carmine horizon casting creeping shadows like vagabonds among the weeds and valleys.

The first sensation Magie noticed was the sudden and bitter chill of the dark. A vast difference from the otherwise torrid climate. Hangmen trees, gnarled stumps without leaves or souls, acted as the main purveyors and she remembered Iza’s words. It was in her best interest to avoid their shade.

A desolate, deserted road, onward and out to a past long forgotten by modern technology. Why this? The low light and dryness played a game of chance by mirages and shadows. A roulette of what may or may not be.

A train whistle sounded, just once. A low and mournful moan. She left the tracks and checked down the line, one way then the other. Nothing came. Walking parallel she waited yet still nothing appeared. She shrugged it off. Was her mind playing tricks?

“A soluble silence, ready to crack and crumble into something more fluid, moving,” Mr. Shade remarked.

“The roiling sands of our unease. I keep holding my breath, waiting for something to leap out and lash at me. This state of perpetual dread is the worst,” Magie replied.

“Nothing’s worse than uncertainty. Faiths have endured for ages just to shed some light on the grim aspect, however manufactured. The meaning of life and death, people can’t stand to be left in the dark,” Mr. Shade’s shadow also cast long and in this land he was taller than she.

“It is much the same feeling as my nightmares; the shadows slink out of the corner of my eye. I can’t shake it. The paranoia of seeing the unseen, being watched,” Magie said.

A signpost met them at a fork, yet the letters slurred unrecognizable. A small shack lurked off to the side. It didn’t seem right, a crooked, leaning thing that didn’t conform to architectural needs. Derelict and dark inside, mage kept her distance. She chose the path of the rails, at least that was certain.

They’d, in time, come across what seemed like an old western town, a ghost town, empty and barren. Dilapidated wooden shacks and taverns stood reluctantly with the rails running through it all. Their long shadows spilled like ink, opaque and runny. Where they merged, an indomitable void formed. Magie found herself winding around the darkness like a labyrinth.

Crows cawed overhead, or something to that nature. Their pitch was off however in a way that couldn’t be discerned. One tumbled out of the sky to land at Magie’s feet. Half-formed, she could see its bones and entrails twitching and oozing out from the missing portion of its body. She gasped and cupped her hands to her mouth. It was as if the left side of the bird had dissolved into thin air. She hurried along.

The structures became more abstract as she progressed. One building would abruptly end without walls or doors. Others would stack unevenly onto each other, sliced and shifted like a Rubik’s Cube, unapologetically against the flow of gravity. Much as the bird, a half-formed and twisted little hamlet.

The rails too adhered to this unnatural course, curving sporadically, winding and even running up walls in ways that defied the capabilities of a train to traverse. At times one rail would twist away and split into a steel web between two walls. More than anything, they seemed to creep when her back was turned.

At some point, the tracks ran through a doorway and into a general store of sorts. True to the rest of the town, there was no light inside. Hesitantly, Magie sparked a glowing orb to hover above her. The interior shadows snuffed it out like a stillborn child. Much like netherial, the darkness here managed to overwhelm the light.

Glancing around, she discovered a stack of old fashioned candles on a shelf. She conjured a candlestick and stuffed it appropriately. Lighting it with a snap, she found this flame able to withstand the shadow. Harbored by the flickering glow, Magie continued inside.

The shaded enclosure gave way to more shadows, stacking onto themselves. Layers of darkness, some more prevalent than others. Out the window a crescent moon gleamed low on the jet black skyline. Night couldn’t have fallen in the shot time she’d been inside.

She continued up a spiral staircase with the rails. They ran sideways the wall and curved out a window, however this one showed the eternally setting sun. She traced the shimmying tracks over a fence and yard encased in shadow and into the window of an adjacent farmhouse.

Like night inside, Magie caught a full moon through cracks in the wall. Her candle served her well but the opposite arm holding it began to ache. Was this an early symptom of schism?

The rails continued to climb the walls and run along the ceiling. What was this sensation? Magie fell upward, smashing through the ceiling and somehow into an upside down basement. Her flame was severed and she landed in murky darkness.

Breathing heavily, she clutched the surrounding floor for the candle. Where was it? Her skin felt chilled and static. Where? She couldn’t find it. She expanded her search, sweeping the surrounding area. There! She grabbed the waxy stick and sparked a flame with a snap. A dim light permeated the room and she reeled back with a gasp: a decapitated corpse hung on a web of steel rails. She squinted at the sight, the arms were forcibly torn off as well and she could see the sinew and gore hanging from their sockets. What fate could have befallen this poor fool?

“It’s fresh, can’t have been killed more than a day ago,” Mr. Shade commented in a raspy tone.

“By the gods… Are you alright, you sound unwell,” Magie muttered.

“This darkness isn’t good for me either. I feel a sickening sensation although I have no body. It’s like my spirit is being slowly poisoned,” he replied.

“I’ll hurry along.”

Magie felt around for a railing or stairs. The basement was filled with shelves and crates, any one of which could be concealing a demon on the far side. Her ears perked up as a soft creaking could be heard from somewhere in the room. She held the candle high and glanced around. Nothing.

Finding a ladder, she proceeded to scale it. Where had the tracks gone? Her arm ached worse and twitched involuntarily. Hopefully it’s nothing.

She had entered an attic of sorts with a red glow from a freshly set sun out the window. And through another the crescent moon returned in a darkened sky. The house, sky and landscape entirely didn’t make sense. Time and directions were meek illusions, ready to give way with her breath.

She searched around for the tracks. Display cases, dusty with cobwebs, littered the floor and some even hung from the ceiling. Magie wiped one’s surface clean to find a disturbing sight; within a half-formed and malformed animal had been preserved. She couldn’t tell what it was but it had two heads of different species and the rear leg and abdomen were missing to reveal entrails and bones. The sight sent chills down Magie’s spine.

A skittering turned her attention. Silhouetted against the window, she caught glimpse of a many legged creature disappearing into the shadows. “Spiders; gods damn it. Anything but spiders,” Magie whispered as her tone turned to panic.

She dashed through a doorway to find herself walking down the outer wall of a multistory building. The present space was illuminated by the last traces of sunlight, deep and disheveled. Around her more distorted buildings slunk and leaned, bending into themselves and curving over the road. A contorted cityscape in ruin.

Suddenly she fell again, this time landing in an alleyway’s rubbish. A dirty little street of broken furniture and dreams. Her arm felt wretched and convulsed frightfully. This was the most light she’d found thus far and held it aloft to her sight.

“Damned to Oth!” Magie exclaimed to find her appendage with extra fingers and joints, thrashing and shaking. It tore from her body and slithered down a sewer grate with her bracelet clanking all the while on the sullied pavement. This was the arm not holding the candle and therefor shrouded in darkness; now a hideous living monstrosity! Is this what the darkness does?!

“Magie!” Mr. Shade yelled as she clutched at the stump where her arm used to be.

“It’s okay; I can regenerate it,” she said and ran her gesturing hand over the phantom limb. Green sparkles emitted from her fingers and fell like snow in the place of an invisible arm. Once they had filled the vacancy with light, it dissolved in a flash leaving a newly grown appendage of flesh and blood. She shook it, stretching her fingers to get the tingling feeling out.

“That’s good but leaves a disturbing revelation. We need to get out of here as swift as possible,” he said.

“Gods, yes.”

Magie walked the ally, searching for the main street. She didn’t find it as the buildings were placed erratically and claustrophobically close. More like walls in a maze than places of residency or business. She wandered for some time like a rat in an experiment.

On one wall she found words, smeared in blood beside a corpse: “Beware the Railwalkers,” Railwalkers? That didn’t bode well. She continued past them, trying not to dwell on the implications.

There. She found the tracks running over walls and in and out of windows. Not just one but several sets. Sometimes rusted abandoned trains clung to them also against gravity. They seemed to be converging at some forsaken place ahead.

At times the rails would wind off into webs between the structures and more corpses could be found strewn about them. All fresh and without arms or heads. Dismembered hangmen swaying in the sour wind.

The ground gradually curved away into a massive crater. The entire city sank into this vast pit, all the more distorted. It was as if the terra had seen fit to swallow the heinousness whole. Here was where the tracks converged: the true rail yard.

Magie halted at the edge, peering down into the chasm. There the tracks all spun into a massive web with the blood red of a setting sun above them and a dark, crescent moon filled sky below. Two horizons each looping in their own phase of perpetual night. She felt it; in the center of the web rested the crystal box housing her soul shard. The center of the web.

“I can’t go on,” she whispered. “It’s a nest.”

Dangling from the steel threads were egg sacks, each as large as she was. They pulsed and twitched as if ready to burst.

“You’ve dealt with webs before,” Mr. Shade said.

“Not spiderwebs. I don’t do spiders. I hate them. More than anything I hate those freaks of nature,” Magie stood on the edge of a leaning building, looking out over the precipice. This was it: her nightmares made real.

“I see it. Can you feel your soul in that box?” he asked.

“Yes, for certain. I have no doubt my soul rest there,” she said.

“Then all you have to do is fly over the web, snag it and get out. If you make haste nothing can catch you,” he said.

“It’s not that easy. Something will happen; I know it will,” she replied.

“Then we’ll face it together. Sometimes the risk of not doing something is worse than the deed itself. Your very soul will burn away into nothing should you turn. Phallun’s mad plans will progress with no one to stop them. You can do this; I know you can,” Mr. Shade told her. As he spoke the sun on the dusk horizon slunk down into the city. Soon night would fall on both fronts and with it total darkness.

“No, I can’t,” she moaned.

“Listen, I’m going to count to three and on three, you rush down there and grab your soul. Okay? On three. One. Two. Three!” Mr. Shade exclaimed. Magie’s body felt stiff with fear but on that third count she was off! She dove, flying as fast as she could for the box!

Low over the web, it seemed to span forever. A wriggling mass of steel and eggs, spun across two perpetual voids. The sunken light cast it into a crimson glow. Her soul was within reach, she stretched her arm and fingers for the crystal box.

It stuck! Yanking the cool stone, the sticky web bent with it, stretching and shaking. The elasticity snapped her back and Magie was flung into the web. She struggled and strained but was caught fast, trapped like a fly.

The vibrations rang out, shaking the egg sacks. They stretched and split and from them not legs but human arms extended. The Railwalkers scurried out, hideous spiders with eight severed arms for legs and abdomens composed of gobbed together human heads, twisted forever in expressions of agony. Scores of them emerged; the egg sacks knew no bounds. They skittered across the web on contorted arms; unholy aggregates of human organs and arachnid tissue.