Pechi had been pressed against the window for almost the entire descent pattern. Her tail was stiff as a board and her eyes were fixed on something so awful no one else could see it. "It's d-down there," she insisted, over and over again. "There's life. Lots-- lots of life."

The landscape below the ship, which was now safely into orbit, was visible through the now-translucent floor. The view was still obscured by the outer ring of the ship around them, but they could see enough of the barren, black landscape to ensure Pechi's claim was completely invalid.

"Did the trees tell you that?" mocked Dusty. "Can I have a word with them about whatever you've been smoking? Clearly you're on something, and while I want no part in it, you could make illegal fortunes back home off of selling whatever psychoactive powder powers half of your thoughts."

Pechi glared back at Dusty, defiantly. "I'll sh-show you," she said. "There's someone down there, and it's not just the seraph's energy."

Benn was bandaging her back feet at the back of the room. She put some tape on her front paws, as well. "We're sure it's going to be liveable out there?"
"We have life support, both magically and literally, but we're going to need volunteers for the mission. Who's interested?" asked Dusty.

The soft hum of all the mechanics in the room betrayed the continuing disinterest of everyone involved.

"That wasn't a redundant question," Dusty breathed. He shook his head. "We need to decide who's going down, anyways. Alexa'll need to pilot, but we could also set the ship to auto and have her maintain the wheel... really, no one is in or out of the question."

"You'll need me down there," insisted Benn. "Or you're all going to get killed."

"I'm-- I'm-- I'm still adamant there's life, and I could find it. Don't you see all those crystal structures down on the surface? It's h-h-hard to tell from this far up, but they don't look regular to me. Can you imagine what might be down there, once we get closer? Someone could have purposefully formed those. They might still be down there. It almost reminds me of Spirit Canira burrows back home, those being a forebear of mine, since I'm Spirit Canira on the mother's side... actually, I have a few hairs of Progenitor on my fathers, but that's a completely different story!" Pechi began.

"Guess we'll have to get it later," Alexa said. "I'm taking the ship down to the surface. You're going to need to land it after all, and autopilot doesn't have the intelligence required to make creative use of the terrain. Neither, of course, do any of you who haven't trained in aeronautics."

"It's not like we were going to leave you and Dusty on the ship," Benn said. You'd take off without us, traitors.

Alexa leered down at her. "I had no intentions of staying alone, but you may attribute whatever false narrative to me you like, if it helps that buzzing little walnut of yours stay active. Does anyone else want to come with us, or are we making this a three-Sentient party?"

Benn's teeth clenched. She ground her back teeth to steady herself, but it was clear from Alexa's expression she'd hit exactly the target she wanted to. The golden Canis was playing a dangerous game, and Benn would have her know it. She'd have her exposed one way or another...

"Why not," Tabai said, emerging from the darkness at the back of the room, from under Lucil's shadow. "If there so happens to be another lifeform on the surface, you'll need negotiations."

"Which won't happen," Dusty objected.

"It will," Pechi snapped. "H-haven't been wrong yet."

"Next time you look at your trees, make sure to give me my readings. I want to know everything so I can prove you wrong," Dusty began.

Pechi nodded. "Deal."

"This is stupid," interjected Alexa. "Dusty, go to the controls panel in the outer ring, and make sure to find Cassiopeia while you're up there. Tell her exactly what the plan is and start preparing to disengage. Once I get the go-ahead from you, we'll dock the central ship on the surface. Is everyone prepared?"

The group looked to each other. It may, on another mission, have been a moment in which particularly exceptional trust was built. Either Benn was just indifferent to this or no such sentiment ever cropped up in her partners, because she herself felt less than nothing. There was a coldness deep in her stomach that began to form as she thought of the journey ahead, but she needn't think long, because they detached almost immediately.

"You waited for Dusty?" Benn pried.

Alexa, who was stooped over the controls, gave her a brisk nod. "I take it you're not assured of my competence. I'd recommend you sit back down and worry about your job, while I worry about mine. It will be mutually beneficial, I assure you."
"I don't know if I can trust your competence," Benn mused.

"I'm not the one who sneaks off to her room alone, daily, Benn. Sit. Down."

With a click of her tongue against her teeth, Benn consented to join Tabai and Pechi in buckling herself into the heavily restrained seats which sat in pod-like alcoves on either side of the room. A protective glass slid up around the cockpit, as if to sever Alexa from her companions, and Benn felt her stomach leaving her body as the ship removed itself from the docking implements.

Dark wings spread out from either side from the ship, though they were near impossible to see from Benn's angle, surrounded by the padding of her 'seat'. Instead, she got a good view of Tabai, who did not seem terribly happy to see her (it was mutual), and if she craned her neck she could see Alexa at her finest. The Canis leered at the controls as if they had personally wronged her.

Time passed in silence. Benn's legs twitched with the urge to shatter something, but instead, she just listed primes. They were a good distraction, almost impervious to intrusive thoughts about every reason her companions had to turn on her, and every situation she'd need to prepare to strike first in.

A starless eternity seemed to pass before the barrier came down and the rumbling feeling of the ship moving around them stopped. It was, in fact, the first time in a very long time that Benn felt perfectly grounded. Alexa looked back to them and the barrier came down, letting the chairs lay their tired heads against the incline where the cockpit began. Alexa walked straight down the center of the room, towards the banner of Lucil, and under her lay a doorway which was already beginning to open.

"That's the airlock," she said. "We don't really trust this planet. Take one of the potions on the walls. It will adjust your internal temperatures and pressures accordingly, but it'll start the matching process almost instantaneously, so we're going to have to bolt outside right after."

"A-as for air?" asked Pechi.

Alexa nodded to the walls of the exposed airlock again. "We're solving that with technology. These are fairly sufficient oxygen tanks and masks, but it means we're mainly going to be telepathically communicating. There's nothing else here we need to talk to."

"Y-you don't know that," Pechi sniffed.

"Understood," Benn said, eager to move the conversation away from Pechi's frankly ridiculous postulations. Benn affixed her oxygen mask and situated a tank on her back. She had to click a strap around her waist closed, then tighten it again at the mouth in several places... it was a messy affair, and it fit like an inverse muzzle extending into her mouth, but one did not pass up air. She held the vial she'd been assigned over her head, telekinetically, and Alexa did the same for herself and Pechi. Tabai, for whatever reason, seemed insistent on doing the whole thing manually, which she was managing, but she still looked stupid. When they were all ready, they mutually gulped the vial and tried to make the most dignified sprint they could for the opening door.

Benn felt her insides shift, as if snakes were writhing around inside her body, and then there was a peaceful silence. Her ears began to ring, but the magic in her body was already shifting to adjust to this new world... a task that might have killed any non-magical organism instantly, but Sentients were more spirit than flesh. Still, it was not as if the spirit of her was better off, because the second she touched the crystalized dirt, the pain she received from the rough, fractal terrain was nothing to the dread that the step sewed deep in her heart.

They were parked in an area of eerily flat terrain, furnished by coarse obsidian sand, but around them were dozens, if not hundreds, of crystalline sculptures. All of it was arranged in a black so deep that little of it caught light at all, and many of the shapes were of the variety that, while jagged, did not seem like they could have been naturally made. Huge spires clutched the sky, jutting in huge, spiralling patterns like horns of the horse-like Esdemel back on Omnia... there were ominous orbs, almost perfectly round, which had been 'grown over' by spikes... free-standing quadrupedal figures horribly distorted by a severe marring of crystal... and they all had the uncanny look that trees, possibly their opposites in nature, had, in that there appeared to be faced whorled into the coloring and even the texture, as if they were in a forest of terrified eyes and open, grieving mouths.

"Is there a problem?" asked Alexa, her voice ringing heavy in Benn's head with the added impact of pure telepathy.

"None of us said anything," Pechi responded.

Tabai stepped forwards through the darkness. The group followed, hesitantly, although Alexa strode fast as possible back into the lead. The Sentients' furs shone brightly against the contrast of pure black, but there were no reflections in the muted stone that gave any evidence they were there at all. As they walked, paws crunching black, painful dirt, they found themselves confronted with progressively larger edifices. As they walked through a valley of sloping black ribs, the sun shone down on the party with oppressive strength, only to be dampened by the black, glossy stone, which was so cold that they could have been millions of miles further away. Worse still was the silence that held over the entire party. It was as if someone had pressed a blanket against their mouths. Had they wanted to speak, they would not have been able to do so.

Nothing else lived in this world to make noise.

Yet someone had been here.

And something was breathing.

Alexa stalked ahead as if she knew where she was going, and though Benn itched to ask where they were and if it might be a good idea to turn around, she found herself deafened. Even if she did speak, would they hear her, by now? Pechi looked lost in her own head, though that was hardly unusual. It was more disturbing that Tabai's vision had softened, and that there was a glassiness in all three of their expressions.

Nothing moved for legions, save for them. The oxygen tanks dipped to around half capacity, hours disappearing into the dirt.

"A-Alexa?" asked Pechi, practically shaking from nerves.

Alexa's head turned in a sea of white mane. "Yes?"

Benn's attention jolted up, momentarily forgetting her surroundings, and she stumbled over a shaft of stone rising from the ground, feeling a sharp pain as the stone cut her paw open.

Almost instinctively, she moved to kick it open, but to her surprise, the stone gave as easily as if she'd tried to kick a piece of wood. There was a brittle crack as it opened, and as her own front paw blossomed up with blood, so, too, did the stone beneath her, its porous interior running over with a sickly black liquid. Closer inspection revealed depetrified flesh under the crystal, color returning to the long, cyan arm.

Pechi stammered, "T-they are alive. There are souls in here-- trapped in the stone--"

Benn's breathing mask whirred as her intake of breath grew sharp.

Tabai bent down to see the blood, which was now trickling over the side. "We come here to gain a seraph's energy to dissuade the Obsidians from breaking into our world, and somehow, we unwittingly invite them into it."

The group froze up, all of their eyes gleaming with a fear far older than their bodies. It was the kind that can only been learned through generations of stories, the kind so primal that it could not be avoided even by professionals sent into the depths of hell. They had all heard stories from the time they were young about the nefarious beings who once did battle with ancient Omnians. They would take victims and torture them in stasis, out of stasis, juicing every bit of fear out of a being until it caved to their wills. This was what the barrier was for, the barrier running off of seraph power that was soon to dwindle into nothing if the Auspicia was not fed the energy of another young god.

It was hard not to look at this planet and see not a nightmare but the near future.

"But why--" Pechi shook her head so furiously her ears almost fell back in her face. "They've got bodies underneath the stone, so it would make sense if someone trapped them there. This is... this is... this is--" She blinked. "A means of control! Of course, it all makes sense. A seraph's job is to guard a world, and you're safe from all harm, technically if you're not, if you can't..."

The group grew gradually more conscious of the stone around them seeming to close in, as if the riblike protrusions overhead were folding in like a wilting flower. A deep red shot through the stones, as if in response, but Benn couldn't tell if the entire thing had been some conniving hallucination or some more legitimate threat. The steady, pulsing thrum was making the stones grow warm, and Benn trusted touch more than sight, so it had to be no hallucination after all. A line of brilliant reds shot up the center of the ribcage and down towards what would be, in a real organism, some kind of head...

"Could be a trap," warned Alexa. "Ready whatever magical means you have."

Pechi's fur bristled. "C-c-consider me warned."

The four of them drew closer, not close enough to touch (thank goodness for it, even in a situation this trying) but enough that Benn could hear their uneven breathing. She found herself pressed ahead by necessity-- no matter what she felt, she was operating on a Vidant's steel nerves, now. Anything that moved would meet her first.

Or nothing might move. Benn could not parse which situation she detested more.

"We're armed to the teeth," Benn said into the empty cavity opening up before them, which, as predicted, resembled a head to an uncanny degree, from the domed top to the eye and nose cavities on the other side. "We-- we won't hesitate to fight, if you put up any threat, seraph." Her voice died out on the open air. Benn looked back to the others and snapped angrily, "This is def-in-ite-ly a trap."

The red lighting grew more and more violent. The ribs themselves dulled, but patterns of light rippled across the black valleys in a multitude of colors, as if something was trying to speak with them. One voice, perhaps, or maybe a silent chorus of millions unable to use the tongues that had been theirs before stasis.

"Do you want to turn around?" asked Alexa. "You know what's expected of someone in your position. If you're not able to fulfill your duties, we might have concerns."

Benn's eyes narrowed into a sharp leer. "I know what my duties are." She entered the room through the base of the "skull" and emerged into a room with a steep downwards spiral in its heart, down to a single pinprick of light at its core. Save for the curious intrusion, there were two large holes at the other side, which had to be eyes, but there was something obscuring the view.

Benn stepped cautiously over and glared at the obelisk in the rooms' heart, which would appear not to be a monolithic structure at all, but some kind of bipedal creature attempting to run away. There were at least a dozen such figures in the room, all posed in combat or mortal terror. Two were on the ground, the former raising a sword over the other, and another had swung a companion against the wall and was bludgeoning them to death with the help of a friend, who was holding them there. There were still grayed-out markings from the blood and viscera, though all of them had been long-since petrified. That familiar flash of light ran through the room.

"Are you sorry?" whispered Benn to the strangers.

None of them responded.

Shaking her head, she called to the others, "It's safe. Whoever came here before us was also petrified."
"That says-- that says really great things about us..." Pechi stopped. "Forget that. I'm just trying to say that we're going to get petrified next."

Benn glared at Alexa. "I'd imagine that leaves me to do the heavy lifting again, doesn't it? Have fun carrying my body back to the ship."

Alexa stared into the abyss over the edge of the spiral. The figures there seemed to be racing, with the final one positioning its hand right over a glimmering light atop a pedestal. "Something's down there."

"Seraph horn!" barked Pechi. "Guess we have to grab it."

"Well, Benn?" asked Alexa.

"I'd prefer to live," Benn said.

"I'd prefer we find a professional manner of resolving the dispute. We could return the treasure between two stones. That way no one has to touch it," Tabai argued.
Pechi was already sneaking down the side. Sliding her way around all the figures, she grabbed the horn in her teeth, which grew in size as she picked it up to curl around her mouth, skewing her oxygen mask until Pechi's face was a mess of blue web, horn, and white fur. She looked up at the others, and with the kind of enthusiasm that could only truly present itself over telepathy, announced, "I th-think we d-did it! C-c-can we go now?"
"Pechi!" Tabai barked. "I can not tell you how many protocols you are breaking right now."

"That's impressive," Alexa muttered. "I really thought she would have died immediately."

Pechi shook her head. "It looks like it's still magically imbued. I can't really estimate from luminance, because scales work differently in space (who even knows how other species use luminance, let alone if their magical body parts would even glow or not... actually, there's evidence to suggest luminance in Omnia has changed a lot over the past few--"

"Is your breathing mask okay?" asked Benn.
Pechi sucked in a long breath. "No!" she admitted. "That's a funny feeling, isn't it? I'm not dying because of the temperature or pressure, but I still feel like I should be d-d-dead right now! Oh stars! I think I'm delirious!"

Benn telekinetically stole the horn from Pechi's mouth, only for it to clatter to the floor. Its magical weight must have been thousands of times more than its physical weight, because picking it up now would have been like trying to hoist a planet up. Pechi stooped down to grab it and placed it on her back, at the same time, Benn managed to readjust Pechi's breathing mask. If she could just act her age, stars' sake, this would all be easier. "And stay silent, please," Benn said a little more loudly than intended. "Let's leave."

As they exited, Pechi seemed to spring across the land, although Benn couldn't shake the fear. The pulsing of the nearby stones had slowed but not quite stopped, and every time she passed by some obelisk she would hear something through the silence, like a murmur made of pure static. Benn could feel them dragging her back towards the cave, a thousand magical grips like sinews of spiderweb, easily torn through but not so quickly forgotten. The strands of ghosts followed her across the empty landscape, and Benn began to see less abstract shapes in the crystal. Many of these bodies had to be recent.

The black crystal began to grow over all of them, at least in some parts, but many were still identifiable as who they'd been before. The muted gray was--

"G'ana," breathed Benn. "Everyone here is like G'ana."

"You just figured that one out?" asked Alexa, curtly.

Tabai knocked Alexa with one massive paw. "If you understood it so quickly, you could have told us."

Alexa looked over the landscape. "All of us, too, if we fail. We're standing on the seraph's trophy ground. Most of them get farther and have to be returned here, I gather, but a lot of them are posed in ways that makes me think..." Alexa's face hardened. "All of the cave beings weren't fighting a seraph. They were fighting each other. Someone had second thoughts too late, and it would appear that the seraph was unamused. Failing the first trial, I suppose. Makes it easier to clean up when the next unlucky party arrives."

"Trial?" asked Tabai.

Alexa nodded. "There are nine planets in this solar system." The light of the ship shone in the distance. Pechi scrambled aboard, standing in the airlock with a potion gripped between her teeth. Coldly, Alexa finished, "If I had to wager, none of them are going to be this easy. Rest up while you can."

"I appreciate your optimism," Tabai called after her before entering herself, the sterile light making her fur look a thousand shades duller than it had in contrast to the stones.

Benn just leered after the three of them as the lock shut and the room began to fill with air. She gripped a potion and downed it, letting normalcy settle back in her veins. Pechi was too enthusiastic, although that might be because she was clearly having some sort of minor breakdown, Tabai was pushy, and Alexa was too confident... any of them could be covering for having murdered G'ana.

Why hadn't they been turned to stone too, then? What were the criteria? Benn knew deep in her gut, even though she loathed her own intuition, that eventually someone was going to give, but Benn couldn't help but think that some members of their party might be helping the process along.