The sun rose ghostly orange through the fog. Trees were left as red silhouettes over the marshland. A lone bird cawed in the early morning dawn, its flying form an indistinct shape through the trees and mist. It curved around to the side passing over their campsite as Eli kicked dirt into the fire and Peter packed up the bags.

Neither of them spoke.

A layer of frost coated the ground and grasses around them, turning the already colorless swamp into a landscape of silver and white. Eli finished with the fire and Peter offered him his bag. He took it without saying anything, throwing it over his shoulder.

The morning was spent in sullen silence Eli walking at the front, Peter trailing ten to fifteen feet behind. Wink rested on Eli's shoulder staring out into the morning mist. Even he didn't have anything sarcastic to say which left only the crunching of their feet over frosted grass.

The mist burned off early in the morning, giving them a view of the valley stretching on towards the hazy horizon.. The sun seemed somehow distant and cold despite the relative heat compared to the stalk.

A flock of small black dots was circling in the distance, likely, Eli thought, over a recently deceased animal,

Their continuing misfortunes of the day did not go unnoticed. Peter got his leg stuck in some mud. Eli ran his head multiple times into multiple different branches, and the map still wasn't making sense to either of them. Eli had a theory about this place, which would make sense, but he didn't voice it aloud. He still didn't feel like talking to Peter.

He knew he should apologize, that was hardly a question, but his hurt pride and bitterness wasn't above getting in the way. He sighed as he turned his head to look up at the sun, no, he was getting in his own way. It wouldn't due to attribute his actions to anything else, even his own personified emotions.

Instead, Eli tried not to think about it, turning his thoughts back to the landscape around them. A landscape that seemed completely dedicated to.... Accidents or.... Failures perhaps? He would write down his observations when he had time later, hopefully somewhere where he could actually write and read normally.

Off in the distance the line of the horizon darkened slightly, and he thought he could see where the end of the basin opened up. That would be where Twisted started. Despite his travels, he had never actually visited Twisted, and knew only the name of their capital city, Churnin. The Acolytes of twisted were supposedly called the bent, though they weren't known for traveling in the state that it left them, so seeing one outside Twisted's domain was rather unlikely.

His thoughts were interrupted as he almost slipped into a puddle, and was forced to drag himself out as Peter watched from a distance, arms crossed over his chest. Eli stared hard at the ground as he pulled his leg from the muck and continued walking forward.

As the sun rose and the air around them heated, the frost on the ground evaporated, and all the walking was making him hot. He pulled off his jacket sometime before noon, but by the time the sun had ascended over his head, he was hot and hungry, calling for a stop to their forced march so they could eat.

They found themselves a place to sit below an outcropping of trees by another small stream of water unpleasantly humid as a cloud of gnats swarmed around them. Eli chewed his food thoroughly before swallowing, worried that he might somehow manage to choke before the day was over. Peter sat in silence ten feet away on another protruding rock.

The silence was growing awkward.

Eli wanted to say something but knew it would probably be a bad idea. He had no idea how Peter was going to react, and didn't want to say anything that might upset him further. Instead he reached into his bag and pulled out his book on the dreads. He frowned, upon noticing there was a spot of water damage on the upper right hand part of the cover, but looking inside it appeared as if the pages were preserved.

He just had to make sure he didn't fall into the next stream or river they encountered, and he would probably be fine.

Eli flipped open the book to the next waiting page, and was surprised when Peter stood and walked over sitting on a rock closer to his side looking at Eli rather expectantly.

He didn't have to say anything.

"And-" His voice cracked and he cleared it awkwardly before being able to go on.

And I saw a creature approaching from the east, moving slowly ever onward, dragging its fleshen bulk over the ground with great heaving waves. It is a twisted creature that wanders a twisted land where the clouds and the plants and the animals and the sky match its churning form. The sound of its approach can be heard for miles, a slow rumbling over the hills and valleys that shake the ground and send vibrations up into one's very bones.. Its movement is constant, and inexplicable and those that live under its wandering gaze find themselves just as twisted, their bodies pulled and pushed and manipulated, hunched and bulbous and cavernous in ways that flesh should not be made.

It takes on the form of a great ancient oak tree dead and rotten away so that no leaves sprout from its limbs, limbs which are numerous and many as the branches of a tree gnarled and deformed. They wave and whip in the dying light of sunset as large, meaty roots pull it across the ground as its limbs wave and wiggle. Rather than bark its body is covered in skin, smooth and calloused from its every churning movements. The tree has many eyes, some large and some small that wink open and closed encrusted with discharge and oozing clear liquids as the lids sag away from red and inflamed flesh under the eye.

To see this creature is to understand what it is to be warped and skewed from true, broken and bent.

Eli dropped the book into his lap and turned to look up at Peter, for a moment forgetting about their argument the night before and expecting the usual barrage of questions that Generally followed.

Instead Peter simply turned to finish eating his meal.

Eli, for his part, kept quiet through the rest of their break, before shouldering his pack again and setting out over the landscape below. The further they went the easier their walk grew, and he began to notice that their feet found even footing more easily and the rate at which they were having difficulties walking decreased as well.

It was easier to walk, and the tension of constantly having to watch where his feet were being planted slowly melted away.

Peter grew slightly more comfortable and the distance between them decreased from ten to five as he looked around the slowly changing landscape.

The first sign they saw that they were entering the outskirts of twisted was a single red flower sitting by the trail whipping back and forth in the wind and following the undulation of the long grass. At first it looked normal, but drawing up beside it Eli pulled to a halt kneeling to examine the plant.

Its stem was green but rather knobby and misshapen in places causing it to twist slightly to the left or right leaving it crooked as it reached up towards the sun. The face of the flower might have been a tulip, though the petals were splayed in awkward directions, giving the flower the look of one that had been sat on by some large animal or perhaps chewed on some point in its distant past, though that appeared to be how the flower grew, and not a condition of its environment.

Eli couldn't help but reach down and pull his journal from his bag, flipping open a page to quickly sketch the strange plant which appeared so out of place in its own environment. Despite its unnatural bends and twists, it was still beautiful, and might have been more so for its uniqueness.

Even Peter had drawn closer to examine the plant gently touching one of its petals with a finger.

Eli looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

Peter paused for a long time as if contemplating whether talking to Eli was worth it or not before saying, "Feels normal."

Eli nodded and stood putting his journal back in his bag before continuing on their way down the path. Up until this point the dirt pathway which they followed had been long and straight, but as soon as they stepped past the warped flower, the path kinked violently to the right, and continued to curve and slither from right to left over ground that was pockmarked with shallow dips and rising hills. On more than one occasion they were forced to double back or take some rather outlandish detour.

It wasn't long before they stumbled upon a field of wildflowers, all similar in shape to the one they had seen on the road earlier. They grew in twisted gnarled tangles by the side of the pathway, some of them turned upside down, their stems kinked a full 180 degrees down towards the ground. This field of wildflowers vanished off into the distance as the light of the rising sun washed over them.

Grass waved at the roadside, bent at odd or unusual angles, occasionally wound around each other in tight spirals, like lovers held in a comforting embrace.

These rolling hills of wildflowers gave way quickly as they peaked at the top of the next hill The landscape below them arrayed out in glorious panorama. The ground, out for miles, was pockmarked and scarred with hills and deep depressions filled with stagnant water. Large rocks jutted from the water and the landscape curling over themselves like the claws of a great beast long buried under ground. The moon hung low in the sky to the east casting a pale red reflection over the waters.

Looking forward, this landscape went on for miles, with no sign of human life.

The occasional tree dotted the landscape hunched next to these stagnant bodies of water. Some of them appeared to be oak trees, or might have been oak trees, though as twisted as they were they didn't really represent any sort of tree the two of them had ever seen. Their roots plunged in and out of the water intertwining with the jutting curved rocks.

These shallow bodies of water produced other strange plantlife as well, poking from the center of these puddles, tree-like, alien things with roots that lifted them up out of the water before they began to grow in strange churning spirals.

Eli and Peter began their way down the track, turning when movement in the tall uneven grass caught their eyes. The two of them stopped to watch as a large deer, or deer-like creature came limping from the bushes.

One of its back legs was hideously malformed. And two vestigial legs grew from just behind its right shoulder, swimming as dead weight against its side, useless or even lifeless. It walked slowly limping towards the water's edge and slowly lowering its head to the water's surface. The massive rack of antlers on its head were almost incomprehensible as antlers, devoid of that common symmetry found in nature.

It looked more like a tightly packed ball of roots than it did antlers.

However, when the Deer turned towards them, head lifted, Eli watched the light of the moon roll over its tawny hyde and blinked once in surprise as its fur shimmered with a metallic sort of glow.

It was only as he continued to stare that he realized the deer had fur the color of gold.

Peter stared at the creature hand over his mouth. The creature's face was mostly without blemish, but the antlers were weighted heavier to one side giving the animal a painful crick in its neck though its fur still glowed with a beautiful golden sheen.

It stared at them, turned and then wandered off.

They watched it go.

"I can only imagine what it has done to the people here." Eli whispered, turning his eyes back towards the undulating trail ahead of them illuminated under a sky more gray than blue, with clouds that billowed and contorted faster than your average clouds reasonably should have.

Eli began walking again, nearly leaving behind Peter who was still stalled staring after the deer, forcing him to run to catch up a few moments later. Their feet kicked up dust as they walked waving through the pools of water and the strange monoliths of stone. More than once they had to climb over a cluster of trees or spied the strange limping wildlife.

A fox with two tails, a hawk with two faces, and even a coyote running on two legs, though it was only a flash as it dashed across the trail ahead of them. Leaving Eli wondering if he had even seen the creature at all.

Off to their sides crumbling stone pillars began to appear covered in climbing slithering ivy.

At first it was only single stones, and then grown over foundations, and then entire walls rising up by stone monoliths decrepit and crumbling to fall to the ground where clusters of rocks would be nested like clusters of bird eggs inside the long grass surrounded by sprays of wildflowers.

The wildflowers grew larger and lower to the ground the further in they went, appearing more strange and unusual as their feet passed over the forest floor, large, and shaped like red tongues wriggling from open cavernous mouths. Gnarled branches closed in overhead, and the distant gray sun sent only patched down through the tunnel of trees, off to their left and right clawing monoliths curved in over them as if walking through a half closed fist.

Wink peered out from the inside of his bag watching as the dappled ground passed by below their feet.

"Not a bad place to live, if you don't mind having nine toes.... On each foot."

Eli grunted, Wink was right, this palace wasn't so bad, but he wasn't entirely fond of the idea of having two faces.

They followed their feet up another steep, but short rise where they could look down on the land once again, miles and miles of jutting stone, and pooling water. He saw no evidence of this fabled location Bishop had mentioned. So far there had been no ruins substantial enough to support a small hut, much less an entire archive.

From what Eli could see, there wasn't even a small village or nearby town that would have supported such a building.

Just miles and miles of nothing.

They took a turn around the next bend, and down through a shallow gully. Stepping from the shade below the stone, the trees opened up for them, the last rock passing by to their side. They crossed over another open area of grass before they were stopped by a sudden burst of voices. The two of them skidded to a halt in their tracks stunned by the distant echoing of,.... laughter ?

It was such a jarring sound that the two of them hardly knew what to do. It was just up over the next raise.

Peter took a step forward but Eli grabbed him by the arm.

The two of them remained rooted to the spot as a group of figures suddenly appeared over the rise.

They weren't like any people Eli had ever seen before, and his initial reaction was to cringe back in shock. The men and women, for if they were that, were in various stages of disfigurement. The man at their head was hunched forward at an uncomfortable angle, his shoulder raised up under a debilitating hunch. His jaw was unusually elongated and his nose was more a mass of flesh than it was a nose at all.

Walking next to him, or rather, some other form of strange movement was a woman who appeared not to have any legs at all.

To the middle man's other side was another man limping on a club foot and missing half of his right arm, and Eli could now see that these three people had been the original source of the laughter. The entire group of them were smiling as they came over the rise, and all of them were wearing a similar outfit of gray with a reddish sort of hood around their shoulders.

The man in the middle carried a book under his arm, while the man to his other side had a satchel over his good arm, limping on a set of wooden crutches as the bag swung back and forth at his side.

The group of two men and one woman came to a skidding halt upon seeing Eli and Peter their mouths still open with their dying laughter. They stared at each other for a very long moment before the man with the crutches raised his good hand, and with a big smile on his face greeted them, "Ho, travelers."

Eli and Peter glanced at each other confused and unsure both wondering if this was some sort of trick, or some form of strange trap.

The woman with a smile on her face and a surprisingly dexterous bound, skidded down the hill on the palms of her hands, which she used to walk over the ground, "She approached them with a smile, "Don't be alarmed, you're safe now." Eli stared at her and despite his constant paranoia, he could see no indication in her face that she was trying to be deceitful. Her smile was wide and bright with a row of perfectly straight white teeth to contrast her dark skin.

Her eyes were wide, bright and innocent.

Peter was the first to greet them back, breaking into a smile, "Uh hello?"

The two other men followed their friend down the hill, the man with the crutches limping at the back.

The man at the center smiled at them, opening his arms as wide as he could, "Welcome to the twisted, my name is Jonah, this is Sirene, and over there is Desmond." his voice was slightly nasal and thick as if it was difficult for him to speak, but his intonation was pleasant and warm.

Peter and Eli glanced between each other, not entirely sure how to respond.

Jonah reached a hand forward in an offer to shake, and slowly Eli took the hand shaking once before the hand was offered to Peter. Jonah stepped back, "Are you two here to visit the university."

Startled Eli raised both of his brows in disbelief, "University?"

The group of three looked between each other in nearly as much surprise, "You mean, you don't know?'

Eli and Peter shook their heads.

Jonah smiled, "Well then, forgive us our rudeness. We are parishioners of the great Gaudium University."

Elie shook his head confused, "Don't you mean, Students."

Jonah shrugged, "Either is fine, If faith is what you are looking for, we have that, and if knowledge is what you seek, we have that too."

Peter, still frowning, offered a hand as if looking to be handed an explanation, "So is it a Temple or is it a University."

Jonah continued to smile, "Yes."

Eli chanced a glance over at Peter whose eyes were now wide with interest. Eli wasn't so sure. This echoed with the same tune he had heard with the order of Hope, and he immediately didn't trust it.

"Please, follow us." Sirene urged, waving a hand at them before turning and crawling up the hill on her hands. Watching her move was mildly disconcerting, but Eli tried not to stare, feeling that it would be extremely rude.

Jonah walked on his right and Desmond walked on Peter's left.

"This is very exciting, your first time at our temple of study."

Eli continued to frown, it seemed strange to use such language in the order they had, mixing terms of science with terms usually set aside for religion.

Peter walked next to him, a bounce in his step and a sort of light in his eyes that Ei didn't much like. It was the Order of Hope all over again. Getting into his head.

"This is the first warm welcome we have had in a long time."

Jonah grinned, "I bet, but the university isn't like other places you have visited."

Eli turned to look at the man unable to contain his skepticism, "You keep saying university, but.... Well where is it? We haven't seen anything."

Desmond Grinned, and Jonah laughed.

Eli looked down, seeing a glimmer from the inside of his satchel where wink hid.

"You'll see." Desmond said, filling Eli with an unease he wasn't sure the other man had intended or not.

He looked up just as they were coming over the rise and Jonah motions to the land before them. Peter gasped and Eli muttered a curse of surprise as they stared down at the ruins.... Or what once had only been ruins now turned into a beautiful stone structure with a high towering wall and an open front gate.

The structure was angular and jutting like the monolithic rocks that surrounded it, made from onyx black stone. Inside the wall, there stood a large structure of jutting black towers and narrow windows. The moon sat almost perfectly behind it cresting the very peak of the very highest tower.

It did look more like a dark cathedral than it did a university.

"But how!" Eli was sure he had looked over the entire landscape and hadn't seen anything for miles in any direction.

This building certainly wasn't something someone could just miss!

His mouth hung open as he stared at the soaring structure, "How... " he turned to look at Jonah who was grinning wide enough it seemed his face was likely to split in half.

"Amazing isn't it, The towers are quite remarkable." Jonah said, "They can be used to measure the different phases and seasons of the moon and the sun. You see." He pointed, "Right now we are reaching the middle of what the professors believe to be the spring equinox if the dreads weren't messing with the weather."

"But I still don't understand how-"

"How you didn't see it?" Sirene said smiling

Eli nodded, mouth still partially open.

"Faith." Desmond said with a grin.

"That and the Diametric."

Shaking his head slowly, Eli ran his eyes over the ramparts of the strange cathedral, "You aren't making sense."

Jonah grinned rather ruefully, "I suppose this is all a bit fast for you. Dimetric means."

"Completely opposed or at extreme opposite ends." Eli glanced over at Peter in a bit of surprise wondering if the other man had been reading his dictionary recently. The locked eyes and Peter just sort of shrugged.

"Well yes, some others call him the prophet, but he doesn't like that much."

Eli Raised an eyebrow almost dumbstruck, but not in a good way. They had to be joking.

"He keeps us safe." Sirene said, "As long as he stays in the cathedral nothing can find us if he doesn't want them to."

Eli didn't like where this was going, it sounded like a thing of Dread. As far as he understood, the world worked through natural laws that remained mostly unbroken, except when it came to the dreads, and the ability to hide an entire cathedral in plain sight seemed like something that was generally against the natural order.

Looking over at Peter, he could see that the other man wasn't half as concerned as Eli felt they should be.

He considered running, but what would he do otherwise?

Clearly there was something to be learned in this place, whether he trusted it or not.

Eli followed after Jonah, his mouth wide open as they made their way down the hill towards the towering building. From here he could see students dressed in the same grey and red clothes walking along the outer wall. Some of them clustered in small groups while others walked alone carrying books or speaking animatedly with each other. Many of the students hobbled with similar deformities to Jonah and his friends, though there were more than a few men and women that seemed almost entirely whole.

Before the open gate large patches of grass had been pulled away and the ground tilled. Carefully constructed aqueducts and ditches brought water to the filends which were being tilled by even more students.

Eli hardly knew what to say.

This building, and the surrounding area was a feat of engineering, a marvel comparable only to the glass city itself. It wasn't often that Eli found himself speechless, but this was easily one of those times.

Peter was smiling.

Eli was growing ever more uncomfortable.

He didn't really trust this, and he wasn't sure why.

Jonah put a hand on Eli's back and led them down through the gate. Eli craned his neck back, eyes widening as the black tower jutted into the sky above him. From here he could see balconies high above upon which students sat reading or speaking to each other. Looking at the building, he would never have called it a University. A cathedral perhaps, A temple maybe, but certainly not a university.

On the grounds around them he looked to see students sitting by a small pool of water, or lounging in the shade of a tree. Others even played a game, tossing a ball back and forth between each other. Other students helped their more disabled comrades out onto the grass.

One man he could see was missing both his arms and his legs, and was pushed along by another student in a strange chair with wheels.

Gravel rolled and crunched beneath their feet as they approached the wide black doors of the University, cracked slightly open.

He could hear voices echoing from inside, even music playing distantly in the background.

May led them through, and both Eli and Petter stepped into the large atrium where light filtered down from a distant skylight.

Eli looked up slowly, and almost screamed as he caught sight of the tree

Twisted looming over them with its great oozing eyes and reaching branches.