Cadenza murmured a few last words of power, and the entire main layer of outer defenses dropped. The rest were enough for a bit of quick spellwork to dismantle, now that the center they had clung to had fallen.

And we’re in the front door.

Doubtless, there would be more barriers and wards to worry about inside, but she knew from that moment on she was running on borrowed time. There was no way Denebola would miss such a big chunk of his wards blacking out at once. She had to move.

The trouble was, the place was so huge. Her tracking spell had petered out here, in this mass of other energies, stronger than the thin little connection she'd had to Zach's and Fabi's magic. She had her senses now to rely on, but Fabi must have been in a room that was still heavily warded inside, for she couldn't feel even a trace of the girl. Denebola's presence permeated the place like hothouse gases in a jungle. For a while, crawling along through the Realm of Shadows, she felt no safer from him than if she had been crawling through air ducts right above his head. She knew it was just superstition, but in that building, it felt like he saw all.

Then there was soon something giving off cold, like someone had left the freezer open—a gathering of ice energy, chilling the area around it by sucking up heat, just bit by bit. Other energies were gathering nearby, and she recognized them as other mages. Whatever was giving off that ice energy—and she was pretty damn sure of what, or rather, who—they were about to have a lot of company if she didn’t spring them free soon.

The only question now is how was he even able to exert any of his magic here, in the middle of Creepbola’s defenses? Guess that’ll have to be an answer for another time…

Beside the ice mage in the room, there was a sort of void she noticed as she came up to it--a big, gaping hole, as if something very large there had been ripped out or covered up. She'd felt presences like that before, and in her mind the memories clicked and made her fingers tense--a Spirit, here? One that didn't want to be noticed, if they were cloaking so powerfully... who? And why? Unfortunately the other mages were getting closer, and there wasn't enough time to puzzle that out.

"Maybe you'll see why we had to do it this way in time," Ernesto was telling Zach. Then a smile simply crossed his face, as if he were watching a rerun of a show he knew and loved, and already knew well what was coming next. "Please take care."

With those words, a large, round shadow opened up under the young man, almost like a hole, but instead of falling into a pit in the earth, he fell between realms into the domain of Shadow. The Realm spread out like endless dark hallways around him, all mere constructs of magic meant to help facilitate perception to the human mind, with ghostly, rippling visions of the world "above" through an almost liquid, violet ceiling. The not-quite-fully-fledged, because she was still living, Spirit of Shadow--his girlfriend's sister--caught him as he fell through an opening in this ceiling and conveyed him smoothly to his feet on the ground.

"There you are, finally!" Cadenza said, brushing off the bit of dust that had come in with him, "And all in one piece too, bom! We've got to get our asses moving here, Denebola's gonna know someone's taken down his wards, and while he can't reach us here, Fabi's still up there to feel the wrath of his ego when he finds out someone's dismantled his precious defenses."