Start the Gate of Kho Kholon

The activation of the Arch of Khokorron is the decisive threshold action that opens the Endeavor’s route toward Bright Defile. Rather than merely passing beneath a monumental structure, Jonathan Heights must enter a miles-high and miles-wide mechanism whose damaged pathways have been altered by earlier expeditions, then force its machinery back into coherence. The passage succeeds, but the Arch exacts knowledge and leaves Jonathan to surrender the object most closely associated with his identity before he can cross into sunlight.

The Monument and the Expedition

The Arch of Khokorron first appears beyond the shifting terrain of the Dead Battle as a colossal construction of red glass, metal, pistons, gears, and sourceless fire. It is deeper than anyone has measured, and its interior resembles a vast sea of intermeshed machinery whose patterns appear and vanish before they can be understood. The opening is not an ordinary tunnel: entering it in its uncontrolled state would unmake the Endeavor. Jonathan therefore treats the Arch not as a fixed landmark but as a mechanism that must be instructed into providing a temporary passage.

Jonathan’s previous knowledge makes him indispensable. He brings Montgomery to the bridge and supplies drawings from his notebooks that indicate the location of a tether dock and the route to a control point. The machinery is in poor repair, and the expedition must carry iron poles or broomsticks with flowers from Ukaresh attached to their ends. The flowers function as warnings: when one freezes, the party must turn away, because the surrounding area contains invisible zones of Unflame capable of crystallizing living beings. Montgomery joins the detail despite the danger, placing curiosity above his ordinary caution, while the Lux Guard and selected airmen provide protection.

The Endeavor approaches a spar beneath a shattered red-glass lamp. The spar is wider than the ship and is large enough to receive the vessel’s tethers, but its machinery is only a damaged fragment of the Arch’s immense design. Oil, heat, broken glass, and the lingering sickness from Angkor Leng make the landing hazardous even before the party enters the structure. Jonathan requires every participant to carry a flower-pole and earplugs, since the control mechanism will produce sounds dangerous enough to overwhelm ordinary hearing.

The Ascent Through the Arch

The party enters through a door built for something three times the size of a human being. Jonathan hangs a spare lantern beside it as a marker, knowing that the interior is a maze of catwalks, gantries, frozen gears, and seized pistons. Their destination is an organ-like arrangement of pipes and pedals high within the structure, but the route cannot be reduced to a reliable map. The suspended passages tremble above a black abyss, while distant machinery continues to hiss and thump beneath the explorers’ feet.

The flowers repeatedly expose the Arch’s hidden dangers. A crewman’s flower turns to ice and splinters, forcing the group to detour around the affected area. Later, Antomine’s flower freezes across an entire walkway, making the party backtrack even though paint has been used to mark intersections. The painted guides are of limited value because the freezing zones are not static. The expedition’s progress is therefore measured not by confident navigation but by cautious testing, retreat, and the gradual destruction of its warning flowers.

The interior also contains living threats. At one level, a low growl reveals a mass of close-set, blinking eyes whose hypnotic effect draws half the airmen toward it. Jonathan, Antomine, and Montgomery restrain the affected men while the remaining guards fire into the darkness, briefly revealing a many-legged creature covered in metallic spines. One airman is pulled back with his nose already crystallizing; the crew amputates the affected appendage to prevent the ice from spreading across his face. The party continues only after this encounter, moving through gloom, shadows, hidden creatures, and the increasingly active machinery of the Arch.

Jonathan Repairs the Impossible Failure

The control platform is not clearly a control station by original design. It may have been a relay or some lesser component, later repurposed by explorers whose method survived through rumor and written record. Jonathan positions himself at the oversized wheels, levers, and pedals and begins following the diagrams in his notebooks. The first movement shifts the lower pipes and releases a howling stream of air. The noise is so violent that the explorers cover their ears even through their earplugs, but the sound itself is not the true danger.

Jonathan laboriously rearranges the controls, experimenting when his notes are insufficient. Once the lower pipes connect properly, the shriek stops. A shaft begins to turn, distant machinery lurches into motion, and the Arch appears to engage. Then the process halts. A wail rises beyond human hearing, and the platform shudders, revealing that the attempted activation has not restored the passage.

Jonathan climbs the pipes toward the failure while the others watch from below. Under the red burning-light, the Arch reveals layers of knowledge that ordinary zint light cannot show. The problem is not a broken gear or a visible obstruction. In the subtle dimensions disclosed by Jonathan’s sunlight-pure vision, the shaft is connected to an apparatus whose reality has become internally inconsistent.

The failure has been produced by the Arch’s history. Earlier expeditions entered it according to different racial rules and bodies of esoteric knowledge, and each visitation altered the machine’s distances and dimensions. The accumulated secrets carried by Jonathan, Antomine, and Eleanor McAvey add further conceptual weight. The mechanism now stands between what it was meant to be and what it has become, with a gap between its intended function and its actual condition.

Jonathan identifies the remedy as an anchor driven across that gap. His solution is not delicate engineering but precisely directed brute force. He removes the sheath from his cane, draws the blade, and thrusts it into the rotating cylinder and the collar beyond. The blade hangs for an instant in an impossible superposition of directions before the machinery draws it into its disjointed geometry. As the cane is distorted by the turning mechanisms, the Arch finally begins to move in earnest.

Jonathan descends from the machinery without explaining himself and retrieves the flower-pole he had dropped. The party returns through the structure while the renewed motion stirs hidden creatures and shifts the Unflame zones. Painted marks no longer reliably indicate a safe path, but the lantern at the exit remains constant. Once outside, Jonathan tells the others that the way is open and that he alone remains at risk, a claim Antomine distrusts but cannot meaningfully challenge.

The Passage and Its Toll

After the activation, the Arch’s entrance changes from an incoherent mass of machinery into a long tunnel several miles in diameter. Burning-lights line the passage and extend beyond sight. The Endeavor is caught by the wind at the opening and drawn inside, while red illumination washes over the ship and produces vistas that may not exist independently of the machinery.

The passage is not free. A cold, rigid presence enters with the light, and the travelers experience the simultaneous sensation of familiarity and unfamiliarity. The Arch takes the instant in which ignorance becomes knowledge as payment, imposing a toll that cannot be paid twice. Jonathan has prepared the fruit from his secret compartment as the intended offering, but when he reaches into his pocket, it is gone. The activation has therefore opened the way without eliminating the danger of crossing it.

The final toll becomes a reckoning with Jonathan’s accumulated sacrifices. His empty estate, his chauffeur and housekeeper, Tiuni’s death, the destruction of Tor Ilek, the books thrown from the Endeavor, the burial of a god, the sacrifice of Angkor Leng, the loss of Eleanor’s friendship, and his banishment from Ukaresh appear as successive payments for his progress. His rejection of the Players and the Game is included among those losses, placing his refusal of their order beside his rejection of every former attachment.

At the last gap, Jonathan sacrifices his cane. He lays its thin sword-blade across the impossible interval, gives up the object that had served as both weapon and support, and takes the final step into Bright Defile. The Arch’s activation thus has a double consequence: it turns the monument into a navigable passage, but it also exposes the personal cost of Jonathan’s method of advancement. The route to sunlight is opened through technical knowledge and physical intervention, yet completed only when he abandons the tool that embodied his life in darkness.