Chapter 36

  Raime drifted higher, past the shattered outer streets, until the plateau narrowed into a gorge splitting into the mountain’s flank. A faint shimmer of psychic pressure prickled at his skin, like heat off stone, and then he saw them.

  Figures moved below—tall, lean, exactly as the murals had carved them. Their digitigrade strides covered ground with startling ease, each step loping and fluid. They were larger than the creature he had fought on Earth, bodies corded with muscle that stretched beneath a grey hide. And each bore the same face—if it could be called a face. One single eye gleamed in the center of the skull, purple, seemingly shining with an inner light. Beneath it, a lipless mouth showed an impressive amount of teeth, more than necessary really.

  What the hell are those for? Not even carnivores have that many, and all pointed too.

  They didn’t speak, With a mouth like that it would have been hard to do. Their movements were silent save for the scrape of claws against stone, but Raime felt the static of their minds pressing against one another, a web of impressions and impulses flashing between them. No words, only hunger, only purpose.

  What purpose though? They should be responsible for the eruption in some way, I don’t believe for a second that they simply survived that phenomenon without being involved… but I heard that roar during the eruption. It sounded like a beast more than anything. Question question, and hardly any answers.

  He stayed suspended in the shadows of the gorge and watched as they encircled something.

  It was another of their kind, smaller, frailer. A youth, though still monstrous by human measure. Its eye dimmed as it thrashed, pinned by jagged spears that looked carved from the very stone of the mountain. The larger ones moved around it in a ritual of cruelty—bones raking across flesh, claws tearing muscle, blood pooling black against the ground. The youth’s mind flickered once, a surge of raw panic that cut across the web before the others smothered it. They weren’t hunting for food. This was judgment. Punishment.

  Raime’s throat tightened. His levitation faltered for the briefest second before he steadied himself, forcing his breath back under control. It came to his mind in this moment, the one he and his father had killed on Earth—the one that crawled out of the Rift—had been one of these. Just smaller. Weaker. A child.

  The thought crashed into him, jagged as broken glass. He had not slain a mindless beast. He had killed a juvenile, torn from its world and flung across dimensions into his own.

  His hand clenched against the Tetra Unum’s haft until his knuckles ached. A child… We murdered a child.

  The forest fights, the endless creatures—he had let himself believe they were just obstacles, trial and error thrown at him by the Rift, soulless things. But these beings were no less a people than humans were. Brutal, violent, merciless—but organized. A society. One that cast out its young like broken tools.

  And one of them found its way to the portal somehow.

  His stomach turned, a slow coil of nausea. The justification—that it had attacked him, that it had tried to kill his brothers—echoed in his mind.

  Does it matter that they are violent? That their society is cruel? If humans were judged by our wars, our massacres, what would the verdict be? What if we ended something too young to even understand what it was.

  He ground his teeth. The thought was unbearable because the answer was both obvious and ugly to face. That creature was not innocent, it harmed his brother with a mental attack. But at the same time humanity was not innocent. He, was not innocent.

  For the umpteenth time since entering Ithural, the quiet weight of what he had done pressed down on him. Not just a survivor. Not just an anomaly. He was something far closer to what this place demanded: a killer, a murderer.

  The figures below finished their grisly work. The youth’s body lay motionless, its once luminous eye dull, as the adults stepped back and lifted their faces toward the mountain. No cries. No words. Only a pulse of thought that rippled outward—cold, violent satisfaction—that grazed the edge of Raime’s senses before dissipating.

  He pulled back deeper into the shadow of the gorge, his psionic Threads vibrating with unease, he was feeling a strange pressure from coming from both the mountain and the creatures. His chest rose and fell in quiet rhythm, each breath heavy.

  He shut his eyes for a long moment before reopening them, gaze fixed upward toward the heart of the mountain. Whatever lived here, whatever drew him closer, he felt it was important, deep in his bones he felt it was something vital for his path.

  The System didn’t give me any instruction about the mountain, no optional objective either, but the System knew about it, in the first phase of the tutorial it asked me to witness a psychic anomaly… and I refuse to believe that it didn’t know that eruption was coming. This is a hint, something I can’t ignore, especially because I’ll be moving on from this area soon.

  Levitation carried him slowly along the gorge, his weapon floating just within reach, silent and loyal in its orbit. Every ruined structure whispered history. Black stone towers snapped in half like broken bones, murals eroded by centuries yet still sharp enough to sear images into his mind. He saw more of the one-eyed figures, etched in ranks, their weapons raised against shadowy forms that seemed to blur even in carved stone. He saw towering monoliths covered in runes that bled faint energy when he drifted near, a hum that made his Thread resonate as though the mountain itself was speaking in a tongue too old to decipher.

  Down below, the creatures appeared again. He caught sight of them moving in packs—four, six, sometimes a dozen. Always silent. Always communicating in the flickering static of thought that brushed his senses. It seemed they were built not to make a sound. Their bodies moved with precision, their hunts efficient. A smaller beast—a four-legged predator with armored plates—exited from a collapsed street at one point. The pack surrounded it instantly, he felt them using a mental attack. The reverberations clear in his senses, the beast simply fell, dead. They approached it, and one by one, claws tearing through flesh, they fed. But not hungrily, there was a ritual in their movements. There was order, a hierarchy.

  Raime hovered above, unseen, unsettled.

  They’re not starving. They’re not desperate like the creatures in the forest. So why attack it? Why all this aggression, everywhere I go?

  The answer lay half-formed in his mind, too vast and too sharp to fully look at. The Rift. The System. Him. He was the anomaly, the crack in the order. If the forest’s beasts were unnaturally hostile to him, then so too were these. Perhaps not by choice. Perhaps by design. That thought sent a chill across his skin. To the System, was he just another trial for them as much as they were for him? Did it pit them against one another not out of nature, but necessity?

  But I got accepted by the Rift, why giving me that title otherwise? I’m missing something crucial. Maybe I’ll find my answers here, finally.

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  He drifted lower, landing among the ruins. He didn’t want to put his boots on the gravel, the sound would be strange in a place where silence seemed law.

  As he walked, his mind drifted—unbidden, but insistent—toward memory. Back to Earth. Back to the face of the beast that first crawled through the Rift. He remembered its wild thrashing, its frantic movements, the screeching it made.

  Maybe that is the reason it was cast out…

  He stopped in front of another mural, one half-collapsed but still legible. This one showed the tall figures kneeling before a massive form carved directly into the mountain wall. A colossus, its single eye larger than a man, carved with painstaking detail, radiating lines etched outward like a sun. Their god, perhaps. Their origin. Or their ruler.

  Raime’s gaze lingered on the enormous eye. His psionic Threads thrummed as if in recognition.

  Somewhere deeper in the mountain, something was waiting.

  He pushed onward.

  The streets narrowed into what must once have been an avenue, lined with broken columns and toppled statues. Shadows pooled thick between the stones, but his psionic sense reached further now, catching the faint contours of structures long hidden to sight. He saw outlines of towers, walls, whole plazas preserved in the echo of the Rift’s psychic residue. It was like glimpsing a city half-alive, layered over ruin.

  And in that ghostly city, he saw the people too. Flickers of thought imprinted in stone. Laughter that never touched lips. Rage that scorched the air. Fear, constant, as if they had lived in a world where danger was not rare but perpetual.

  The weight pressed down harder. He could not hate them. Not anymore. Not as mere beasts.

  From the shadows of a shattered temple, movement drew his eye. A pack of the one-eyed creatures spilled into the avenue, dragging something between them. Not prey. Not one of their own. Something else.

  It was twisted, malformed, almost human in its frame—two arms, two legs, but bent wrong, stretched too thin, its skull too long. Its eye had not formed at the center, but two pale orbs bulged asymmetrically on either side of its head, unfocused, blind. It wailed—not with sound, but with raw psychic discharge that made Raime’s mind recoil.

  The pack jeered without sound, their thoughts slashing cruel arcs through the air. They struck the malformed thing, driving it down, their satisfaction dripping like venom.

  Raime’s jaw clenched. He could hardly breathe as he watched the pitiless display. This was their justice. Their mercy was extinction. The malformed did not belong.

  He wanted to look away. His instincts screamed to move, to keep climbing toward the mountain’s heart, but his eyes refused to leave the scene. Because in that broken figure, he saw himself.

  An anomaly.

  An error in the design.

  And the Rift—the System—was letting him live only so long as he proved useful.

  The malformed one’s thoughts reached him, raw and desperate. Not words. Just the simple, agonized plea of something that wanted to be more than it was, something aware enough to know it was broken. Then the pack silenced it with a final strike, a spear through its chest. The psychic wail cut short.

  Raime shut his eyes. His breath shook.

  I am the same. I am the mistake that should be purged. And yet here I am, climbing into the home of their god.

  When he opened his eyes again, the pack was gone. Only the corpse remained, discarded like trash.

  He turned away. He could not help it. He managed to avoid being spotted until now, and easily at that. But the creatures were clearly not apt at detection, while he could perceive a bit far away from himself, and floating was a cheating ability while having to move without making sounds. He went forward, his levitation lifting him higher until the avenue opened onto a vast platform carved into the mountain’s side. The city ended here. Beyond it, the slope rose steep and sheer, leading into caverns that glowed faintly with purple light. The pull was stronger now, like a tide dragging at his bones.

  He paused at the platform’s edge, looking back once more over the city. Ruin. Cruelty. Death. And yet, life. A people who had once been more than this, reduced to violence, to survival, to the worship of whatever sat in the mountain’s heart.

  He had expected wilderness. Maybe a giant beast waiting at the heart of the mountain. Instead he had found a civilization, twisted and brutal.

  He tightened his grip on Thunk and turned toward the caverns leading inside the mountain.

  Whatever awaited him in there, he would face it. Not because he was ready. Because he wanted to. Because finally, he felt he had the means to not get swept away by the circumstances.

  The cavern mouth swallowed him in silence. The walls were streaked with veins of crystal, jagged clusters that gave off the purple glow he saw already from outside. The light wasn’t strong, but it was alive, shifting as if the crystals pulsed in rhythm with the mountain’s hidden heart.

  He followed a long corridor and then slowed, levitation keeping his steps weightless. A cavern opened up, its ceiling too high to see, stalactites hanging like jagged teeth above. The air here was different—colder, sharper, and faintly metallic. Every breath carried the ghost of ozone.

  Raime withdrew the map from his satchel.

  The eye Xethz glowed faintly under the light of the crystals. He narrowed his eyes. The section of Ithural he had traveled through was extremely detailed: the twisted forest, the temple, the ruined city. All of it was perfectly recorded, while the remaining Ithural was less thorough, it was still clearly recorded and visible.

  But the mountain…

  The mountain had been an empty blotch. Now, where he stood, it was beginning to fill up. But beyond the caverns’ mouth, the hologram stuttered. It bent, warped, flickered between clarity and static. Warnings pulsed at the edge of the map, unreadable symbols twisting and breaking as though the artifact itself struggled to comprehend what it saw.

  Another reason for investigating, was this place never explored by the Ithurians? Or it’s confirmation that the System put it here for some unreadable reason… maybe just to create more conflict. But I will know, I want answers dammit.

  He brushed his thumb along the sphere. A trick he’d discovered earlier. He sent a sliver of psychic energy into the map. It flared, soft but steady, white light spilling from the surface like a lantern. He let the glow fade, satisfaction flickering through him. It wasn’t much, but in darkness, it could make the difference.

  For now, though, the violet glow sufficed. His eyes tracked easily through the dim, sharpened by his heightened Perception, every detail crisp—the fine cracks in the stone, the faint signs of moisture, the way the crystals angled like they grew toward something deeper within.

  The cavern narrowed into a long corridor, and it was there that he sensed them.

  Three signatures. Maybe four. Stronger than the beings outside. They did not move. Their minds pulsed in rhythm, coordinated, waiting. Guards.

  Raime hovered back into shadow, letting the cavern’s bend shield him. His psionic Threads stretched outward, brushing against the surface of their minds. He didn’t dive deep—didn’t dare—but even the surface told him enough. Discipline. Focus. Violence held on a leash, not unleashed.

  He eased Thunk into his grip, the cool steel familiar, grounding.

  So this is it. They are guarding something, and past here you need permission to enter.

  He breathed slow. His pulse was steady, almost calm. Yet his mind was a storm.

  The choice lay bare before him. He could strike first, surprise them as he had surprised the centipede. He could drive Thunk through their skulls, unleash the Tetra Unum’s blades, cut them down before they even knew he was here. His control now was sharp enough to make it possible. Their secrets would be uncovered, there were answers within his reach.

  But it would be blood. More blood.

  He remembered the murals. The malformed child. The pack tearing at their own. The first of them that had come to Earth.

  Do I keep walking this path? Do I keep telling myself it’s survival?

  His Threads trembled, vibrating not from strain, but from him. His thoughts fed back into it, echoing in a way he hadn’t expected. He could almost feel the mountain watching, waiting to see what choice he would make.

  If I fight, what do I prove? That I’m not afraid? That I’m strong enough now to force my way deeper? Or that I’m exactly what the Rift wants me to be—a killer, without hesitation?

  He steadied himself against the wall, the cold stone leeching the heat from his palm. His mind warred with itself. Curiosity burned like fire in his chest—the pull of the unknown, the truth that lay behind those guards. He wanted to know. More than food, more than rest, he wanted to understand what this place was, what it meant, why it existed here, a void on the map that even the System could not—or would not—explain.

  But every step forward would have a price.

  The guards moved in unison, their thoughts weaving together in a silent pattern. They did not know he was there. He had the luxury of choice, something rare in the Rift.

  Raime drew a slow breath, Thunk heavy in his hand. The Tetra Unum hovered, its blades quivering faintly as if hungering for release.

  The cavern stretched before him, lit in eerie violet, the air sharp with the tang of metal and unseen pressure. Behind him, the city lay in ruins, its silence filled with echoes of cruelty. Ahead, the unknown waited, guarded and secret.

  For the first time in a long while, Raime realized: the Rift wasn’t forcing his hand. Not here. Not now.

  This time, the choice was his.