The Immortals of Notoriouslandia
Chapter Twenty-Six: Into the Crystar Depths
The portal still hung over Balgandreantauy like an open eye. Wide. Watching. Waiting.
A crackling wound in the sky pulsing with crystalline light.
Below it, the Unbound Team stood at the city's Sky Tower platform, now reinforced with magnetic anchors, gravity locks, and military barricades. Sirens still howled in the distance. Med-bots carried the wounded. The air shimmered with ozone and smoke.
But here, it was silent.
Descentedrain stared into the heart of the vortex.
"We can't defend from the ground anymore," he said. "Whatever's behind this portal… it's directing the chaos."
"It's time we take the fight through it," Sapphire added, stepping beside him. Her voice was firm, but her eyes flickered with buried tension.
Mr. Shonk cracked his knuckles.
"You had me at reckless cosmic jump into another realm."
"It's not just another realm," Sapphire said, slowly. "It's my universe. Or what's left of it."
Kukranchunlikryting looked up, his toxin-etched gauntlets pulsing.
"Then we shut it down. One crystal heart at a time."
Descentedrain turned to the technician manning the portal stabilizer.
"Open the jumpline. We're going in."
Crossing the Threshold
As the stabilizer whirled to life, the portal crackled and split wider—revealing a churning tunnel of mirror-like energy that spiraled inward, reflections twisting and stretching reality itself.
The team stepped forward as one.
Gravity warped.
Time stuttered.
And then—they were gone.
Welcome to the Crystar Depths
They emerged in a realm of impossible geometry.
The Crystar Depths wasn't a world—it was a floating expanse of fractured islands suspended in a black void. Everything shimmered like glass. Spires of crystal floated in midair, drifting like icebergs. Massive crystalline whales swam between floating ruins. Light here didn't cast shadows—it refracted, bending in unnatural ways.
The ground beneath their boots was semi-transparent. Beneath it, a sea of slow-moving crystal creatures shimmered like a waiting army.
"This is where they were sealed?" Descentedrain asked, scanning the horizon.
"Yes," Sapphire said quietly. "This is where we buried the Crystal Kings."
"Then why does it feel like they're waking up?"
A soft tremor passed through the realm.
Far ahead, in the center of the Crystar horizon, stood a massive structure:
A spire-palace grown from blood-colored glass, ringed by dormant crystalline statues. The energy around it pulsed like a living heart.
The Memory Echo
As they made their way across a levitating bridge of floating shards, the air grew colder—and heavier.
Suddenly, Sapphire stopped.
A humming sound rose from her armor.
A recording.
An echo from the past.
A projection formed in the air—a memory locked in crystal.
A figure appeared. Tall. Regal. A woman cloaked in red crystal robes. A crown of jagged energy hovered above her head.
"We, the Crystal Kings, ruled not with cruelty… but with order. With symmetry. With silence.But those who screamed the loudest shattered our rule.They sealed us in light, thinking us broken. But symmetry always restores itself.And soon, the song of structure will rise again."
The vision shattered.
Everyone stood frozen.
"That was Queen Vaeridax," Sapphire whispered. "The first Crystal King. She's been gone for centuries."
"Not gone," Kukranchunlikryting said grimly. "Waiting."
A New Portal Opens
As they moved deeper toward the spire-palace, another tremor shook the realm.
Behind them, in the direction they came, a second portal opened—not artificial, but organic, like a wound bleeding blue light into the Depths.
From it, figures began to step through—crystal-beasts, winged and horned, but behind them walked something larger… humanoid, armored in white-crystal plates, wearing a cape of fractured starlight.
Not attacking.
Not rushing.
Just watching.
"They're… not mindless," Descentedrain murmured. "They're organized."
"This is a resurrection," Sapphire whispered. "They aren't invading to conquer... they're reclaiming."
Ending the Chapter
The team took defensive formation atop a floating platform overlooking the palace and the marching army beyond it.
Five glowing obelisks rose from the ground, pulsing with ancient language.
Each one bore a single name:
Vaeridax. Luronen. Krezhail. Tharnum. Elixiir.The Five Crystal Kings.
"We're not just here to fight monsters," Descentedrain said.
"We're here to face an empire."
And somewhere deep inside the palace…
The Crystal Kings opened their eyes.
The shimmering terrain of the Crystar Depths pulsed around the Unbound Team like a heartbeat—slow, steady, growing louder.
But Sapphire wasn't listening anymore.
Not to the wind.
Not to her allies.
She had stopped moving.
Her eyes locked onto the palace in the distance, shimmering with energy long thought extinct. Her breath caught in her throat.
"...Sapphire?" Descentedrain said gently, stepping toward her.
She didn't answer.
The world around her had gone cold and bright.Memories poured in like ice through cracks in glass.
[FLASHBACK – 502 Years Ago]
The Fall of the Crystar Depths
She was younger then.
Wearing crystalline silver armor, her hair longer, her face less battle-worn.
The world she walked through shimmered with elegance—the palace of the Crystal Kings, still whole, rising above a pristine realm of symmetrical towers, radiant bridges, and structured stillness.
She remembered Queen Vaeridax standing tall at the apex throne, flanked by the four others. Together, they called themselves guardians of order, but what they really ruled through was fear, suppression, and total control of thought.
All beneath them glowed with unnatural calm.
"Emotion is weakness," Vaeridax had once told her. "Chaos, noise, rebellion—all distort the pattern. Harmony is silence. Harmony is obedience."
And Sapphire, a commander of their elite force then, had once believed them.
Until she saw the cost.
The Rebellion That Never Was
That day, the resistance attacked.
And Sapphire switched sides.
She remembered running with the rebels, forming fracture lines in the glass roads, disabling power nodes to disrupt the mind-channels. She remembered her best friend—Laythrienne, a mindweaver—falling to a lance of raw crystal shot from King Tharnum himself.
She remembered her hands trembling.
And she remembered what she did next.
She turned her own blades inward—toward the throne.
She fought her way up the mirrored spiral, through mind-controlled soldiers and living statues.
She faced Vaeridax alone.
The Duel at the Throne
It wasn't epic.
It was desperate.
Vaeridax, radiant and terrible, fought with crushing waves of crystalline thought—psychic barrages, fractal blades that folded space.
Sapphire dodged, barely surviving.
Then she turned her weapon on the palace's central mirror core—the generator of the entire Crystar Depths' power—and shattered it.
KA-CRACK.
The shockwave erased armies. Froze the air. Split the world.
The Crystal Kings, caught in their channel, were locked in suspended consciousness, encased in stasis pillars, preserved by their own energy loops.
Sapphire thought she had won.
She remembered falling.
Bleeding.
Alone.
[END FLASHBACK]
She gasped, staggering back, and Descentedrain caught her by the shoulder.
"What happened?" he asked softly.
Her voice was quiet. But her words, heavy.
"I sealed them. I broke the core. I gave up everything to end their empire."
She looked out across the shimmering void of the Crystar Depths.
"I thought I ended it."
Mr. Shonk stepped closer, still holding his trident.
"Then who opened the door this time?"
Kukranchunlikryting's voice was calm, calculating.
"Someone… or something… is trying to bring their consciousness back online."
"And we're standing in the download zone," Shonk muttered.
The Crystal Pulse Begins Again
From the spire-palace far ahead, a low hum began to grow.
Lights flared from each of the five pillars encircling the structure.
One by one, the names of the Crystal Kings began to glow:
Vaeridax. Luronen. Krezhail. Tharnum. Elixiir.
And in the center?
A sixth obelisk—one Sapphire had never seen before.
It glowed with a single word:
"VEL'ZHAIN."
She stepped back.
"That… that name didn't exist in my time."
Descentedrain's voice was quiet.
"Then we're not just fighting your past.We're fighting what's coming next."
And high above them, within the swirling heart of the palace—
A figure stirred.