Chapter 43

  The last strips of meat hissed over the stone, fat dripping onto the fire below with small hisses that mingled with the faint evening winds. The smell clung to the clearing, sharp and heavy, seeping into his hair and armour. Raime turned each piece with steady precision, mind elsewhere even as his hands worked. His awareness reached outward, brushing the forest edges for any stir, but nothing approached. The smaller beasts kept their distance this far away from the forest, and for once, the night itself seemed to respect his space.

  The cube rested beside him, unmoving, its metallic surfaces catching faint reflections of the suns. At first, it had been only a burden, an unwieldy luggage he dragged along because he had no better option. But necessity had pushed him to test it, and the results were more than promising. Sitting atop it, letting its weight carry him while his psionics wrapped around the whole, he discovered something unexpected: it drained far less than levitating his body and the cube directly. Almost as if the artifact’s structure cooperated with his energy, distributing the strain instead of fighting it. It wasn’t for sure built as a method of transportation, but it will help him in the voyage to come.

  He had laughed then, the sound short and rough, thinking how absurd it was that he was about to ride a bonafide strongbox into a sea of grass, hunted by alien tremors, to reach a voice who spoke to him through some chains that were holding a giant eye.

  Fuck my life… this sounds like it’s coming from a lucid dream, or an acid trip. Maybe I’m in a coma in a hospital bed right now. Nah, I don’t believe my brain can put me through all of this shit just because. I hope at least, what if in the last exam session I went mad? Hahaha that would be more realistic than anything this place threw at me.

  The meat finished one portion at a time. He cooled the pieces and wrapped them carefully in waxed sheets before stacking them inside the cube, storing enough to last a few days. Every action was done with deliberate calm, but beneath it ran urgency—a pressure like a hand against the back of his skull, reminding him that the eye had not forgotten him. Retaliation could come tonight. Or in a week. Or perhaps when he finally set foot in the capital.

  The uncertainty made each moment feel borrowed.

  When the last of the meat was secured, he doused the fire, covering it with dirt. Then, without returning inside the temple, he climbed onto the cube, crossing his legs atop its flat surface. The metal was cool against him, he let his shoulders fall back and closed his eyes, breathing in deep.

  Meditation came easier now, not because his turmoil was gone, but because of all the training he had done. His Threads uncoiled slowly, sixteen now, sifting through the air, through himself, through the ragged edges of his mind. The cracks left by fear, by anger, by the chained eye—they did not vanish, but his thoughts brushed against them without breaking. Like waves that lapped at stone and retreated, again and again, smoothing the surface little by little.

  He had no intention of sleeping here. To lie in the monk’s chamber now would be to wait for the trap to spring, to give his enemies a roof and a bed to pin him against. Out here, in the open night, he was not safe—but at least he was mobile. If anything came, he could spot them and run, or fight.

  The cube sat beneath him, inert, steady as a raft on still water. Inside it carried the meat, the artifacts, and on its surface it carried him without complaint. He will take two hours of rest, perhaps enough to recover nearly all he had spent hunting, fighting, resisting. Enough to put him back near his peak before the crossing.

  His lips twitched in a humourless smile. All-nighters and borrowed strength. Some things never change. Just that instead of coffee now I’m using real magic.

  He adjusted his posture, spine tall, hands resting against his knees. The Rift’s night was strange—no stars, no moon, only a bruised sky stretching without end. But he had grown used to its oppressive colours. Even here, his awareness painted shapes: the pulse of insects under the bark, the faint flicker of scavengers drawn toward the discarded carcasses deeper in the forest, the shifting breath of the wind through unnatural leaves.

  And beneath it all, the bond he had formed with the young drokhar. Faint, fragile, but warm. Its presence pulsed gently at the edge of his mind, a heartbeat away, soothing in its own way. He lingered on it, letting the beast’s childish joy echo through him, a balm against the weight of what lay ahead.

  His breathing slowed. His body eased, though his mind remained sharp. He did not drift into dreams, but into a state between—alert rest, where muscles loosened and energy pooled again in his core.

  A couple of hours. Then the grasslands. Then the capital.

  He exhaled through his nose, thoughts steadying like stones settling at the bottom of a lake. And entered a state of half awareness and half recovery.

  The forest gave way slowly, the trees thinning into scattered columns of pale-barked trunks before surrendering altogether to the horizon. Raime moved at an unhurried pace, stepping over moss and roots, he wanted to walk a bit, stretch his legs before the long time he will have to sit on the cube. His mind fixed forward but pulled backward all the same. He felt the pull of the temple behind him, the quiet halls where he had bled, sweated, healed, and learned to weave power from the recesses of his own mind. The air smelled of musk and damp soil, a scent that clung to him as though trying to chain him to the place he was leaving.

  He didn’t look back at first. Each step forward toward the Sea of Grass carried a weight, as though his limbs fought not with the air but with memory itself. The Rift had never been kind, but in the temple, he had carved something close to refuge—a room, a bed of stone, a routine. To walk away from that now, to abandon it for the uncertainty of the capital, felt like tearing loose from a home he hadn’t realized he’d made.

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  When at last the trunks parted and the world widened, Raime stopped.

  Before him stretched an expanse unlike anything he had seen before his arrival in Ithural. A plain rolled outward, not of golden prairie nor of Earth’s gentle meadows, but of black grass that shifted like dark water. Each blade was long enough to rise past his knees, thin yet sharp, swaying with the wind in vast currents. And beyond—the horizon was swallowed by lavender suns sinking low, bleeding purple and deep red light across the sky. The colours washed over the field until it looked less like grass and more like a restless sea under twilight.

  The Sea of Grass.

  His map flickered beside him, lines of light drawn on the air marked this expanse clearly, warned of the threat levels in the whole area. He knew what waited here. He had tested its edges before, enough to understand the rules.

  The sea did not allow intruders.

  During his preparations he came to this same place, to understand what awaited him. He stepped closer to the edge, the mossy ground of the forest fading into dirt, and then the first fringe of the tall grass. The blades brushed his legs, cool and damp, and the earth beneath seemed to tense like a coiled muscle.

  Raime froze, listening to his senses while the ground started to rumble.

  It was not the deep quake of an earthquake, but the localized shudder of something big beneath the soil. The vibration ran up through his boots and into his bones. Then the grass to his left split, a violent eruption as a maw rose from the earth—four jointed plates snapping together into a mouth large enough to swallow him whole. The strike came for where his leg had been, but Raime moved, his body lifted in the air, boots brushing the beast as he threw himself upward. The jaws clamped shut with a hollow crack that shook the surrounding stalks.

  For a heartbeat, silence. Then another mouth burst open farther ahead, thrashing, hunting the phantom vibration of his step.

  Raime’s lips twisted into something halfway between a grimace and a laugh. The floor is lava, he thought bitterly. Only this lava had teeth, and hunger, and enough territorial rage to turn on its own kind when denied prey. He had seen that on the failed strike, the two beasts fought, maws colliding, tearing at each other with frenzied abandon. Predators turned cannibal the instant food slipped from reach.

  His feet did not touch the ground again. He held himself afloat, not daring to put a foot on the ground, nor to brush the grass.

  Yes, this was what the System had been preparing him for. The exercises of levitation, the hours of refining his Threads, the practice of replenishing his reserves—it had all pointed here. Not just survival, but traversal. A necessary step to reach the capital. There were no other paths shown on the map.

  He looked back once. The forest edge lay quiet now, the shadowed canopy folding inward like a curtain, hiding the stone temple and the chambers within. He thought of the drokhar beast he had left behind, its massive presence lingering at the edge of his bond like a half-remembered voice. He should name it, he told himself. Names gave weight, tethered connections in a way simple thought could not. It had become a friendly presence, however tenuous, and walking away from it twisted something inside him that felt like guilt.

  The sensation was familiar. Years ago, when he left home for university, he had felt that same knot in his chest: excitement pressed flat by the ache of leaving, the sensation of stepping into something greater but losing pieces of himself along the way. The temple had become a strange mirror of that old memory, a home he hadn’t expected to find. And now he abandoned it. Again.

  But this time, he reminded himself, the road was not just for knowledge or ambition. This was survival. This was the damn tutorial, still binding him with ball and chain. The System wanted him to reach the capital, to confront whatever waited there. He clenched his jaw. Was it coincidence that the voice from the chains in the depths of the temple had pushed him the same way? That both the Administrator and that nameless being seemed bent on dragging him forward?

  Conspiracy or fate, it hardly mattered. He could resist neither.

  Raime drifted back a step and sat on the cube, the metal cool beneath him, and set Thunk across his lap. The lever-weapon’s familiar weight steadied him, grounding him against the tension that still made his hands tremble from the vault. At his side, the Tetra Unum floated, its edges gleaming faintly in the dimming light like a sentinel awaiting command.

  The grass rippled again, a vast wave of motion triggered by the subtle shift of his weight. He stilled himself, breathing slow, letting his awareness bleed outward. Beneath the stalks he felt the beasts—lurking, coiled and ready. They were everywhere. The entire sea was alive with them.

  He gripped Thunk tighter, then released the tension with a deliberate exhale. He knew his limits. How much energy he could burn, how long it would take to recover, how far he could sustain the effort without collapsing. The crossing was not impossible. It was dangerous, yes, but it was exactly the type of danger he had been crafted to face.

  His gaze swept the horizon, where lavender light bled into deep indigo. The capital lay somewhere beyond that sea. He would pass this trial, as he had the others.

  Raime let his breath settle, and with it the cube steadied into motion—smooth, deliberate, never brushing the stalks below. The artifact floated just above the swaying expanse, gliding forward without a sound save for the faint shift of air displaced by its passing. Each current rippled through the grass, making dark waves bend away from him, bending in unnatural patterns against the rhythm of the wind.

  Below, the response was immediate. The earth trembled in bursts, a predator surging up here, another there, each eruption leaving the stalks quaking in its wake. Huge maws snapped shut on nothing but air, confusion ringing through the strange mental static Raime brushed against. Some lingered beneath him, following for a short while before frustration drove them back down. Others turned on their own kind, violent clashes splitting the grass into sudden whirlpools of snapping, thrashing bodies. The frenzy passed as quickly as it came, swallowed again by the restless black tide.

  Through it all, Raime remained untouched, floating on his metal raft like a lone traveller over water. He held his posture firm, spine straight, eyes half-lidded. His Threads worked with the cube, spreading the strain evenly, and his mind slid toward the stillness of meditation. Each inhale gathered the weight of expenditure, each exhale softened it, so the drain on his reserves became manageable, almost soothing.

  He adjusted the height of the cube to stay just a bit higher, this way he was using more energy, but it was manageable, and it reduced the risk of the beasts. Now they were just checking his passing instead of erupting from the earth.

  He kept the cube’s pace steady—faster than a man at full sprint, but not much more. He could push harder, cover the distance with raw speed, but it would bleed him dry long before he reached the far side. No, this was the rhythm he needed. The most efficient balance of power and endurance.

  He fixed his gaze on the horizon, the line where violet light met the endless sea of grass, and let the world move beneath him, patient and relentless. He steeled his resolve and made for the capital.

  I’m coming, whoever you are.