As spring comes to the city, the cabal is hard at work on their own projects. Adele, expanding her knowledge of the Arcanum of Space, talks to Goes about learning the rote for Spatial Map. The older mystic happens to have a grimoire containing the spell and lets Adele peruse it in exchange for a favor later. It seems the book is part of the Catilinians' library and is strangely adorned with the symbol of an eye.
Meanwhile discussion continues over the cabal's various problems, particularly Anna. No one is quite willing to agree to kill her, especially Adele, and there is no apparent way to remove her powers. They hypothesize that a Master of the Spirit arcanum could seal her powers or that they could bind the demon that gave her the powers into removing them. Either would come at a steep price, especially as the only Master they know would be Midas, Dominus of the Seers of the Throne. They also discuss who is helping the cabal and Adele, with Merlin and Anna. The mage is powerful, at least an Adept of Spirit and Mind. Is this mage aware of Adele's "destiny"? Is he or she a Seer, pushing the doom (and potential rise of the Great Fire Spirit) toward the Pentacle? Valkyrie points out that fire is uncontrollable and could easily turn back and destroy that which the Seers care about. No one would benefit from the disaster. But was there a force behind the fire spirits? Someone who would benefit? Mammon and Colt speculate that it could be an Apostate or someone within the Consilium.
Colt brings up the message he heard from the City: "The mentor murders the watchers and topples the defender of a friend." Who are watchers? Or the mentor? Both Cicero and Athaliah are brought up as possibilities. After their discussion, Mammon decides to investigate the Great Fire Spirit and options for shutting down Anna's power. That way they can let the mortal authorities deal with her.
Then one day Athaliah calls in her favors with the cabal and her ties to her students. She needs their Demense to delve into the the deepest parts of the Astral. On Decima's advice she has also chosen to take the cabal along with her on the journey. They schedule the attempt for spring break for Adele. Valkyrie creates a cover story for Evan. She tells him that she is out of town covering for a friend's gig. Since they will all be meditating for what might be days, they bring Miguel and Goes over to watch the house for them. Valkyrie sends Evan to her neighbors for a couple days and Mammon makes sure Vincent covers for his own work and looks in on Evan from time to time. Colt makes sure James stays in his room for the time being.
After a full meal and preparation, they begin to meditate. Eventually they each begin to drift into a waking dream. Mammon pushes his way up a steep slope which leads to his dream vestibule. The cathedral is letting out of mass, but this time the people are drab and uncaring amid the snow and bitter winds. The only voices he can hear as he walks past are those of his parents yelling at him for failing a test. He pushes on deeper into the Astral to regions he has never visited before. The others struggle to reach the Astral. Colt find himself in Africa amid the scrub and sand. He can feel something tracking him, something unseen. The deeper he goes into the wilds the closer the creature gets. Eventually his path twists and heads past where the creature was.
Adele's path leads into a mall. The path leads deeper into the confusing hallways of the mall, until she is completely lost. She keeps to the path though and pushes on. Valkyrie finds herself at her childhood home in Georgia. As she heads away from her backyard, she hears her parents are furiously calling after her. After a moment of hesitation she ignores their calls and heads deeper into the Astral.
Mammon enters a strange version of Chicago as it was during the Prohibition. He finds himself sporting a monocle and fedora, while wearing a green and black zoot suit and carrying a polished cane. He quickly spots Athaliah leaning up against a streetlight smoking a cigarette on a long stem smoker. The flapper has her hair in a short bob cut, wearing a cloche with a colorful bow on it to match her loose red dress. As the two wait for the others she points out the weird cameras mounted on the buildings and the large symbol of an eye on the Chicago Board of Trade building. It is clear something was working against the group.
Meanwhile Colt walks out of the desert into an African village. Rather than hike to Chicago, he uses a spell Athaliah had set up to teleport over to them. In Chicago, he finds himself decked out as a mob gunslinger, carrying a guitar case. The three study the symbol marked edifice, noting their path leads directly to it. Worse they recognize the symbol of an eye as the sign of the Seers of the Throne, specifically the Ministry of Panopticon. At that point Valkyrie also appears, having used the spell to jump from Atlanta. Unsurprisingly she appears as a lounge singer in a slinky sparkly dress. Mammon decides to grab a paper, the Tribune Eye. Athaliah is unsurprised at the name. Reluctantly, she reveals that she has a history with the Panopticon, having killed some of their leaders during the war with the Seers a decade ago, at the Tribune Building itself. The paper reports about the mayor of the city replacing the transportation superintendant to fix the city's traffic woes. Adele finally arrives having run from modern day Chicago. She finds herself wearing a conservative black dress, buckled shoes, and wearing a wide brimmed hat. Somewhat surprised at her appearance, she joins the rest of the group.
They head toward the towering building. In the lobby they pass suspicious security and Valkyrie quickly hides and turns invisible. Then the elevator opens before them and several people come out: a fat man in an ill fitting suit, a high class woman, and older man dressed like federal detective. They call for the guards and a battle breaks out. Valkyrie appears from thin air, cutting the female Seer, Root badly. She then sidesteps the obese Crash Override's poorly aimed telekinetic blast, letting it add to the Root's problems. Root takes cover, shooting at the swordswoman, injuring her slightly with flecks of shrapnel. Colt is winged by the final Seer, X2's shots. Mammon attempts to attack them mentally but finds them well defended by mental and magical shields. He dives for cover. Adele lashes out with the powers of Stygia and takes down Root. Colt pulls out his tommy gun and begins to gun down X2. Athaliah and the others overpower the mundane security. X2 meanwhile gets the elevator open but falls to Colt's hail of bullets before he can get in. Valkyrie turns on Crash and sets him on fire. He teleports out as he screams about his pretty face burning. With the battle over and the elevator inoperable, the victorious mages take the stairs up.
As they ascend the the building, they find themselves on the outer face, slowly climbing the spire. As it wraps around the building, the Art Deco metal and glass gives way to Gothic gargoyles and granite. This in turn gives way to classical marble and friezes and then to hieroglyphs and a mix of limestone and clay brick. Finally they reach the top amid an endless black sky. In the distance a single star winks at them. With nowhere higher to go, they descend by a different path. The series of steps leads down to a flat plain, where a single massive unworked stone rises into the sky. A grisly scene greats them as they approach, dozens of rotten bodies hanging from crosses on either side of the path. The wood is bent and decayed but the corpses are untouched by carrion eaters. Mammon and Valkyrie are worried by this development, fearing more attacks. Adele finds the display of death sort of interesting.
The stone itself is huge, rising into the sky until it is obscured by the clouds. The grasses about it are greener than normal with a few roses near the base. Valkyrie remembers something she heard about mists that rise from cracks in the surface of the stone. Supposedly these mists help one understand the High Speech runes carved on its surface. Some of the symbols are familiar, others completely foreign. As they breath in the mists, they find several of the symbols are those naming the Exarchs. The sigils also speak of those who defy the gods and the doom that will come to them. The Pentacle is named as among those who are defiant and who will be punished.
After examining the symbols for a short while, Athaliah sings several lines to create a gateway deeper into the Astral. A cavern opens up and they descend into its labyrinthine depths. A scathing cold breeze blows through the caverns, a tiny part of the Ecstatic Wind that erodes all Astral Travelers of their sense of self. Following the breeze they find a tight crack in the rock. Glyphs along the crack spell out a riddle in Atlantean. Colt is able to guess the answer ("Platypus") opening the crack and revealing a thin ledge partway up an immense tree.
Next they climb the great tree. The winds are intense and a fierce storm lashes out at them. Climbing the rain slicked wood, they spot a dark serpent clinging for dear life to an outcropping. Mammon climbs out to help it while Adele watches him, both hoping the creature can be trusted. As the others ascend to another ledge, Mammon reaches the serpent which lunges out and grabs his arm. Together the two make it to the top. Adele unfortunately finds herself stuck on the side of the tree. Ultimately Valkyrie pulls her up telekinetically. Looking up from the narrow ledge, they see a massive spider like swarm of blackened bronze serpents coiled about the rotten wood of the tree, rending it apart. Mammon's serpent slithers away into the tree, leaving them to find a way forward. Eventually, the area under attack explodes in a sheet of fire as the wood collapses and serpents destroy that part of the Spire Perilous. Valkyrie freezes the approaching lava and they climb up and into the Dreaming Earth.
They find themselves in a blackened lava field under a sky of cinders. Slowly they make their way across the wilds attempting to find a way to the sidereal wastes. Athaliah admits to never having been this far before. They trudge across the fields of black glass, under a rain of ash. Colt leads them through the thick ash falls and they find themselves in a frozen wasteland, filled with endless snow and outcroppings of creatures frozen in ice. Avoiding the trails of monstrously large rabbits, they shiver across the ice under a blinding white sun. Slowed by the cold, Valkyrie shields the group with Forces magic. Pushing forward they spot three figures meeting them at the top of an icy dune.
One is a black man covered in the screaming faces of those around him, including the cabal. There is a woman surrounded by whirling machinery. The last is a scarred man with prosthetic limbs, whose visage caused Athaliah to cry out, "You're dead!" As they attack, Colt opens up with his Tommy gun. Anybody and his creepy faces vanished in a blink of an eye. But the others were able to turn aside most of his bullets. Wounded the machinist Jacquard melts his gun like butter. Adele strikes at them with Death magic, while Valkyrie cuts down the cybernetic Daneel with her blade. Mammon runs afoul of yet another magic shield. Defiantly Jaquard shoots Colt and is torn down by Athaliah.
They press on into a blazing desert of white sand. Light blinds most of the group except Adele and Athaliah. Gradually the desert is erased and they wander into a region of pure light. The light gives way to an endless starry darkness near an icy shore. The air is strangely dim and the black sludge washing up is viscous and seemingly alive. The mages get an unnerving adrenaline rush and cold sweat breaks out as they approach the sea. The thin stench that rises from the surface roils their stomachs and fills them with an inner gnawing.
As they move along the inky shore, they can feel something following them. Just out of range, they hear footfalls and catch glimpses of pale forms loping among the dark rocks. Meanwhile something horrid with chitinous limbs and bruised flesh pulls itself out of the shore of the Abyss. It mewls weakly to them like a new born creature. They decide to avoid the pitiful thing and press on until the stones grow larger and slabs of rock make up the beach. On top of a pile of slabs they encounter a silver hair man who calls himself Zio. A preacher of sorts, he claims reality is without meaning and appears to be in a nihilistic state of mind. Mammon engages him in a debate where he ultimately prevails in the convincing him that reality has meaning. As this occurs a winged eye lands near Valkyrie and attempts to warn her to leave the others or her son will learn the Truth of reality. She ignores it, and Zio offers aid in their journey in the form of a Space Ban to protect them from the Abyss. Accepting the gift they press on.
Albino half men creatures then charge over the jumbled rocks, hurling stones at the Astral travelers. Not wanting to be slowed down, they continue, as the beach breaks up into floating stones until finally they fly though a void to distant celestial bodies. After months floating along, they find themselves on a cold dead world, exposed to painful radiation of an unshielded sun. The subjective months in space have left everyone drained and Adele a little unbalanced. She freaks out as she reflexively looks into shadow and spots the strange formless creatures dwelling there. Then the Morlocks attack again as they are scrutinizing the spirits. Valkyrie holds them off as Athaliah and Mammon punch a hole into Shadow. They flee the degenerate monsters and wander Shadow amid screaming spirits, empty of resonance.
They spot tangled thorn bushes growing amid the craters. A large leaning tree appears over the next rise and they find the Aeonic Citadel.