Riven came to in stages.

  He was sprawled across a mass of crushed flesh and shattered bone. The impact had been absolute—the creature had died instantly, its body literally bursting apart under the weight of the fall. Scraps of entrails and fragments of ribs jutted from the carcass, forming a slick, shapeless carpet beneath him.

  For long seconds, he remained motionless, unable to move. His breath was cut short. Air came only in shallow, ragged bursts, each one scraping painfully through his throat.

  Once his lungs finally filled with oxygen, he rolled onto his side to slide off the corpse. The movement sent a deep, burning ache through every muscle in his body, and he toppled heavily onto the hard ground, his back pressed flat against the stone.

  He lay there, trying to assess the damage.

  His limbs responded. His fingers moved. Nothing seemed broken.

  But every fiber of his body felt like dead weight, muscles screaming in protest from the abuse they'd taken.

  "I... I don't think anything's broken," he muttered, his voice hoarse and unsteady.

  Riven had his eyes fixed upward. He expected to see the sky, but instead, a sheet of rust-colored fog hovered above him.

  Something was off about this fog. It didn't drift like normal mist. It hung there, motionless and oppressive, like a mass of stagnant air that refused to dissipate. These were deep red miasmas, dense and opaque, suspended beneath the ceiling of the fissure like a roof of toxic vapor.

  As he stared at the strange phenomenon, a thought struck him.

  Lya.

  He pushed himself up with a grimace, his muscles protesting the effort. Once on his feet, he swept his gaze frantically across the interior of the fissure, searching for any sign of her.

  Then he saw her.

  She was sitting against a wall, breathing hard, her eyes darting nervously across the rocky surfaces around them. Her gaze was distant and clouded with confusion, but when it finally locked onto Riven's, relief washed over her features immediately.

  He dropped to her level. "You okay?"

  She nodded.

  He looked up along the wall, confused. "How... how did you make it?"

  "I tried to drive my dagger into the wall to... to slide down and slow myself," Lya said, her voice soft. "But I couldn't get it to hold."

  She lifted her eyes toward the ceiling. "But those huge red roots cushioned my fall, so I didn't die. Just a bit dazed at first, but I'm better now."

  He extended his hand to help her up. "That was too close."

  Lya gripped his hand and pulled herself to her feet, brushing the dirt from her clothes. "Yeah."

  She turned her gaze back to him, her expression tightening with concern. "What about you? I saw one of them jump on you."

  Riven glanced over his shoulder at the shattered carcass behind them. "Yeah. I managed to twist mid-fall—made sure it hit the ground first." He paused, exhaling slowly. "Close call though."

  When he turned back, her eyes caught the torn fabric across his shoulders, dark with blood.

  "It got you."

  Before he could respond, she stepped around him, her hands already reaching for his back. "Let me see."

  Riven grimaced but didn't resist as she pulled the torn cloth aside, revealing the deep claw marks carved into his skin.

  Without a word, she placed her hands over the wounds, the familiar green glow pulsing from her palms. Her fingers worked with practiced efficiency, pulsing just enough Koras to close the worst of the gashes and stop the bleeding.

  Riven raised a hand. "Alright, that's enough for now. Save it for later."

  She pulled back, letting the glow fade as she caught her breath. For a moment, silence settled between them, broken only by the sound of their breathing and the faint drip of water somewhere in the fissure.

  Then she glanced up at him, a trace of admiration in her voice. "To think you'd realized there was solid ground under that... fog."

  Riven rolled his eyes, resting his hands on his hips. "Oh…I didn't."

  She slowly turned her head toward him, her brow furrowing as she shot him a heavy, exasperated look.

  "What?!"

  Riven waved a hand dismissively, already turning away. "Anyway, I guess we're stuck down here now."

  Lya let out a short, nervous laugh, barely audible, as she slowly shook her head. She crouched down to gather her belongings.

  Her hands were shaking.

  She stared at them for a moment, willing them to stop. They didn't.

  Riven noticed but said nothing. What was there to say? They'd made it. That was enough.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Silence settled between them, heavy and thick.

  The light from above struggled to pierce through the thick fog, casting a scarlet glow that bathed them in a deep red ambiance.

  At that moment, he called out to her. "Look." He pointed ahead. "There's some kind of... passage, I think."

  A large opening gaped in the wall, like the entrance to a tunnel, framed by a broken arch. It was made of the same black stone as the structure they had slept in the night before.

  Lya touched the dark stone of the arch. "These look like the same symbols we saw before, don't they?"

  He simply nodded.

  I guess we don't have any other choice, do we? The walls have to be at least ten meters high. Too high for us to climb.

  They exchanged a glance, and without a word, they stepped into the tunnel.

  As they ventured deeper, the underground passage widened into a vast gallery with irregular walls. The air grew thicker here, humid and warm, carrying the faint copper tang of old blood.

  The surface was a mixture of rock and compacted earth, forming a rough, crumbling barrier in places.

  Lya's gaze was drawn to the blood-red roots crawling along the walls like spasmodic degenerations, evoking sickening capillary growths. Small buds sprouted from them like golden gangrenous excrescences. These luminescent globes lit the tunnel with their sickly glow, their only source of light in the darkness.

  Riven focused more on the ground, deeply stained a scarlet red from which the roots seemed to draw their strength. The smell hit him then—sweet and rotten, like overripe fruit left to decay.

  But what caught his attention was the viscous, syrupy scarlet liquid seeping from the walls toward the floor. Stagnant pools and slick trails marked the path of a former stream, as if the flow had dried up recently.

  "Looks like... some kind of system," she muttered, her voice low and thoughtful. "Like everything's connected. Living, but... completely corrupted. Every root, every drop of this slime—it's like the aftermath of an infection that devoured everything."

  He nodded. "Yeah. Everything we've seen so far seems affected by some kind of rot... like an infection or decay."

  The silence had barely settled in when Lya started humming again, which threw Riven off slightly.

  Seriously. How can she hum at a time like this? We don't even know what's waiting for us.

  They kept walking, the tunnel stretching endlessly ahead. The only sounds were their footsteps and the faint, wet drip of liquid somewhere ahead—slow, irregular, like a dying heartbeat.

  Riven felt the dull weight settling into his legs, a heaviness that built with each step. The constant march through the oppressive tunnel was grinding away at his focus, the repetitive sameness of it all pressing down on him.

  He glanced at Lya. She had stopped humming at some point, her expression now distant and focused, as if she too had begun to feel the weight of the endless passage.

  After a while, the underground passage changed slightly. They arrived in a somewhat larger space that split in two directions—one to their left and the other straight ahead.

  Debris was scattered everywhere—a mixture of earth, rock, old bones, blood-red roots, and plenty of other junk piled together in chaotic heaps.

  The two of them stood in the middle of the room.

  An intersection. That's a change, at least. But where do we go now?

  Riven crossed his arms, resting one hand under his chin as he stared at the paths ahead.

  So, Left or straight ahead?

  The sharp crack of a bone snapping under Lya's boot jolted him back to the present.

  "I'll check both sides first," he said aloud, making sure she could hear him even though she was no longer beside him, already busy rummaging through the space around them. "We'll decide after."

  "Or we could just pick one and go," Lya muttered, not looking up.

  Riven paused. "You in a hurry?"

  "No. Just..." She trailed off, focusing on the debris. "Never mind."

  Riven watched her for a moment, then shook his head. If she wanted to talk, she would.

  He turned toward the left passage, stopping just short of the entrance. The path dropped sharply, the slope irregular and broken, soaked with scarlet liquid.

  This is probably where the stream used to flow... before it dried up, at least partially.

  So, not this way. Definitely not.

  The other path looked more "normal"—just wider and more irregular than the tunnel they had come from. He was almost relieved until he spotted something unsettling in the distance.

  Two egg-like shapes in the distance.

  They looked like milky-white cocoons, shaped like ordinary eggs but larger than Riven himself. His grip tightened around the hilt of his sword when he noticed they were cracked open.

  Okay, that's really not good. This path isn't any better, actually.

  "Lya, there's something—" He stopped short. She wasn't listening, crouched over something in the debris, her attention completely absorbed.

  "Look at this."

  He crouched down beside her. "What is it?"

  She pointed something out to Riven, a small smirk tugging at her lips. "This."

  "I don't know what it is, but it looks like some kind of object... I think."

  The object resembled a talisman made of dark stone, about as wide as Riven's palm. He took it in his hands and felt the cold sensation of the stone against his skin. Symbols were engraved on its surface, with a large eye at the center—deliberately the most prominent feature.

  "Do you know what this is exactly?"

  She nodded with a wide, satisfied smile. "Yes. I think... no, I'm actually sure it's a relic."

  She took it from him to show him better. "As time went on, I started to think there weren't any here, because we hadn't come across any and also because this place is... special."

  "But this is definitely one. Look."

  She held it in the palm of her hand. "Normally, it just looks like stone. But watch." The moment her Koras flowed into it, the symbols flared to life, pulsing red. The eye at the center seemed to come alive, glowing with an unsettling intensity.

  “I don't know yet what it does—I haven't had time to test it, and it's not like there's an instruction manual—but I'm sure we'll figure it out at some point."

  Riven's eyes widened as the red glow pulsed between her fingers. He leaned in closer, his full attention locked on the talisman, studying every flicker of light across the symbols.

  “I thought they'd be in a vault or something... Not just lying around. In a pile of trash.”

  He glanced at her. "But anyways. Even if we don't know what it does, keep it safe. I'm sure it'll be useful at some point."

  Lya shrugged. "I guess so." She stood up, keeping the relic cradled in her hands.

  As she examined it further, something else caught Riven's attention. Between the blood-red roots and beneath a flat stone, he spotted the edge of something pale—a piece of parchment, half-buried in the debris.

  He knelt down and dug his hands into the dirt, brushing aside roots and loose earth until he could pull it free. The parchment was old, its edges frayed and stained, but intact.

  He was about to unfold it when a sudden sound cut through the silence.

  Distant at first, muffled by the winding tunnels, it grew sharper with each passing second—raw, desperate cries echoing through the underground.

  Riven's head snapped toward her. "Humans... here?"

  Lya clenched her jaw. "Yes. Just ahead... and terrified."