"This doesn't make sense," Kalem muttered as he pushed himself off the ground, shaking dried blood from his gauntlets. Another blackout. Another crater of carnage. His boots crunched over shattered bones and warped stone, the ambient glow of the Abyss pulsing like a flickering heartbeat behind his eyes.
He stood alone again. Just like the last time. Just like all the others.
"No wounds," he said, scanning his body. "Not even a scratch."
Only his armor told the story — his left vambrace was twisted inward, the plating on his right thigh was punctured as though bitten. But when Kalem removed the dented pieces with a grunt and careful hand, what lay beneath was not what he expected.
Not mangled flesh. Not torn muscle.
Just pale skin.
And white scars.
Dozens of them. Faint, smooth lines. Clean. Like surgical incisions long since healed.
"Not human."
"A weapon."
"A tool."
"Fearless."
"Absence."
The chorus had returned. Not screaming. Not mocking.
This time, just observing.
Kalem flexed his fingers. "I remember the last one," he said aloud. "It had teeth like broken glass. My arm was inside its mouth when I blacked out. I felt it…"
He grimaced, peeling back his glove and inspecting the skin beneath.
Nothing.
His bones should've been shattered. His tendons should be torn. But instead—scars. Dozens of them. Fresh, but healed.
"Was it mana?" he asked himself. "Some kind of auto-repair? A triggered spell?"
He shook his head. No. He hadn't cast anything in weeks. No glyphs. No scrolls. His reserves were tapped most of the time — the Abyss's oppressive mana field interfered with most conventional incantations anyway. And yet…
"I'm not healing. I'm changing."
The realization settled like a stone in his gut.
He needed confirmation.
Kalem reached behind his back and drew the Icefang Rapier, its blade still coated in a fine frost that shimmered in the strange half-light. He took a breath, then another. Then slowly, deliberately, dragged the thin edge across the palm of his left hand.
Blood beaded.
It was black, not red.
Kalem froze.
The wound was shallow, intentional — just enough to bleed. But the color was wrong. Thicker than it should've been. Not quite coagulating. The air around it felt cold. Too cold.
And within seconds, the gash sealed itself. Leaving nothing behind but another pale scar.
"…Right," Kalem whispered. "So it's not healing. Not like a mage would."
It was like his body was rejecting damage entirely. Not absorbing it. Not repairing it. Just bypassing the trauma. Like the laws of biology had been rewritten, erased and rewritten again, deeper and darker.
"Why me?" he whispered.
"Because you stayed."
"Because you listened."
"Because you broke."
"Because you're not finished yet."
Kalem leaned against a chunk of stone, wiping his now clean hand on his cloak. His heart didn't race. It hadn't in days. No hunger gnawed at his belly. No thirst parched his lips. The only fatigue came from his mind — from memory and repetition, from the war of voices in his head.
He looked down at the rapier, then slowly slid it back into its sheath.
In the distance, the pulse of the gate was still steady. Like a drumbeat in the core of the world. With every blackout, every loop, every flash of mutilated things rising from the dark, he found himself returning closer to it. Drawn not just by curiosity, but something magnetic. Something embedded in his very marrow now.
He walked forward, slow but steady. His path was clearer now. Sharper.
Fragments of the Abyss's architecture still shimmered in and out of reality around him — stone walls folding like fabric, time jumping ahead by seconds or dragging back in loops. Once, as he passed under an arch of fused bones, he saw his own silhouette walk ahead of him, then vanish like fog.
The world had lost meaning here.
But Kalem hadn't.
He found another corpse slumped against the wall — this one fresher than the others. Human. Or once human. Its armor was more modern than the rusted relics from earlier ruins. A scouting mark on the pauldron — a northern expedition crest, barely visible beneath the rot.
In the corpse's hand, a notebook.
Kalem pried it free. Pages stuck together with blood, but one was readable:
"We sleep and wake and fight and die. We try to leave. But the Abyss forgets us. Or maybe… we forget ourselves."
He closed the book without a word.
The Abyss didn't just kill. It consumed identity. That was its real threat. Not monsters. Not mana. But erosion.
Memory. Meaning. Will.
Kalem clenched his hand again. The one that had bled black.
It didn't scare him.
What scared him was how normal it felt now.
Was this how the others had started? The ones whose bones lined the gates? Did they too begin wondering when they stopped needing food, when wounds closed too quickly, when names became harder to remember?
He took one more look at the pale white scars littering his body.
"I'll carry them," he said, voice like iron. "But I won't become what you want."
"We're already in you."
"We're just naming what's there."
"We are the scars."
Kalem turned away from the voices.
He didn't need their approval.
But he would find out what the gate was hiding.
And he would end it.