The icy slurry of the marsh channel forced its way into my mouth, my nose, under my eyelids. I wasn’t breathing. I didn’t even dare to move, feeling the peat sludge—a mixture of rotting leaves, sand, and someone’s ancient bones—cling to my face like a heavy, stinking mask.

  Just above the surface of the water, barely a meter over my head, a Hound swept past. I felt it not with my ears but with my bones—the deep thrum of its levitation discs rolled through the water, setting my teeth chattering and knotting my insides tight.

  When the rumble faded slightly, I carefully raised my face above the surface. Every breath was agony, my lungs feeling as though they were full of crushed glass. The air after the icy water felt scorching, saturated with the acrid, greasy smoke of alchemical residue. From the direction of the hut came the smell of a fire—Efrem had set it ablaze after all, erasing the last traces of our presence.

  The sky over the marshes, usually gray and lifeless, was now slashed with crimson and blue beams from the search Spheres. The Fan hadn’t left. They hovered over the ashes like gigantic bone-white vultures, waiting for their prey to burst from the smoke.

  “Efrem…” I breathed, choking on a cough. My voice was barely more than a rasp, immediately swallowed by the whisper of the reeds.

  No answer. Only the crackle of burning wood and the distant, piercing whistles of search Hounds calling to one another through the fog like a pack of predators.

  I reached for my chest. Beneath my soaked jacket, the crystal pulsed like a living, deeply wounded heart. It was hot—so hot the skin beneath it began to go numb. But the worst thing wasn’t the burn. It was the voice.

  The same voice that had spoken the name Zeno.

  It sat inside my skull, splintering into thousands of tiny, jagged shards, each one stabbing into my brain.

  “…the path is tainted. Transitioning to the hidden mark. Spark convergence: status ‘Indeterminate.’ External interference detected. Zeno… Zeno…”

  “Shut up… just shut up!” I clutched my head, feeling the veins throb beneath my fingers.

  I forced myself to move. Crawled through the reeds, the sharp edges of the sedge slicing into my palms. My boots, filled with icy water, weighed a ton each. The mud sucked at my body with obscene loudness, every squelch ringing in my head like a hammer on an anvil.

  After a hundred meters, I found him.

  Efrem lay face down in a thick patch of raspberry brambles. His cloak was scorched, exposing charred runic patches, and the fingers of his right hand were still clenched convulsively around a shard of black mirror, smeared with something dark and sticky.

  “Alive?” I collapsed beside him.

  The old man slowly rolled onto his back. His face was ashen, but his eyes still burned with that same cold, calculating malice of a master—the thing that passed for his soul.

  “Quiet, idiot…” he rasped. “The Hound dropped a Scream-Seal. They’re listening to every splash within a verst. If you start whimpering now, they’ll carpet this square with fragmentation bolts.”

  With a groan, he slumped onto his side, clutching his burned shoulder. The stench of scorched flesh hit my nose.

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  “Did they hit you badly?”

  "Wait. How the hell am I even understanding him? Efrem—and everyone else I’ve met—isn't speaking English, or any other language I’ve ever studied. The sounds are guttural, alien, yet they translate in my skull with the pinpoint precision of a high-end neural interface. It’s as if my linguistic centers have been bypassed entirely. Is it the crystal? Or am I just another line of code being integrated into this world’s terminal? To hell with it. I’ll leave these questions for later—if there is a later."

  “Nothing… burned down to the meat,” he forced out something like a grin. “Had worse. The crystal—what’s happening to it? You’re radiating disturbance, boy. You’re glowing so bright they can see you from bird’s-eye height in the Mirrors of Truth.”

  I looked down at my chest. Through the soaked fabric, a torn, twitching green glow was breaking through—furious now, like crackling ether discharges.

  "Mana. The word flashed in my mind instantly, trailing a bitter, hysterical edge of a laugh. I’d spent half my life in sterile laboratories, yet here I was, labeling mystical energy based on the trashy fantasy novels and manga I’d skimmed to kill time back on Earth. It was absurd. My scientific brain was already using fictional tropes as a desperate mental crutch to categorize this impossible reality. I’d leave the formal analysis for later—if 'later' was even an option."

  “It won’t quiet down,” I whispered. “And it’s talking to me. In Zeno’s voice.”

  Efrem froze. His hand stopped mid-motion. Slowly, he turned his head toward me. His stare was terrifying.

  “What exactly did it say? Word for word.”

  “That you’re not the answer. That I need to reach the node where three forces converge. Efrem, enough riddles! Who is Zeno? And why is your stone warning me about you?”

  The old man didn’t answer as he pushed himself to his knees. Over the marshes, the whistling hum swept by again—the Spheres were repositioning, their Beams of Revelation burning through the fog ever closer.

  “If we don’t leave through the Dead Loop right now, you’ll never find out,” he said sharply. “The crystal activated the soul imprint of its previous owner. Your veins are already restructuring to match the artifact’s pattern. If we don’t dump the excess power into raw earth, in an hour you’ll be an empty vessel for someone else’s mind.”

  We moved toward the ancient drainage. This wasn’t escape—it was agony. Every step sent spikes of pain through me. The world began to change: where I once saw hummocks, ghostly lattices now emerged.

  The crystal replaced my sight with its own logic. I could see the trails of burned ether left by the Spheres in the sky—and the pulsing veins of traps beneath the water.

  “Don’t trust what you see!” Efrem shouted. “That’s the stone’s mirage!”

  “…Efrem lies. Always lied. The crystal is a cage. My cage…”

  Zeno’s voice boomed inside my head.

  I stumbled and fell into the sludge. Tears burst from my eyes.

  “It says you’re lying! What did you do to Zeno?!”

  Efrem struck me across the face.

  “If you don’t shut up, I’ll leave you here! Zeno tried to cheat the system—and became a prisoner of the boundary inside that stone. Want the same fate? Then keep listening to the voices!”

  We reached a concrete wall, but our path was blocked by a Watch Obelisk—a massive tower with rotating lenses, sweeping the area with a white Beam of Revelation.

  “We won’t get through,” Efrem gasped. “The crystal is tearing the etheric balance apart. But… we can use that. You have to open yourself up. Completely. Channel the surge toward the tower—burn out their runic bindings.”

  “But you said it would consume me!”

  “Use the Covenant of Shadow! Zeno will guide you!” Efrem grabbed my shoulders.

  I looked at the tower. Now it appeared to me as a complex structure of vulnerable connections. The voice in my head whispered sequences of impulses. It all made sense. Too much sense.

  I flung my mind wide open, letting Zeno’s dead consciousness flood my thoughts.

  “The Covenant… of Shadow…” I whispered.

  The cold vanished. The pain vanished. Only lines remained. The world became a blueprint, and I simply crossed the tower out of reality.

  The flash was so powerful the sky split apart. A blinding green dome swallowed the tower, and the next second the Obelisk drowned in a fountain of sparks.

  Then came absolute silence.

  I collapsed onto the concrete, feeling my consciousness leak away through my fingers.

  “Run…” I heard Efrem’s voice.

  The last thing I remember is Zeno’s face reflected in a muddy puddle.

  But it wasn’t my memory.