"Why?" Aelric demanded, breath ragged.
"Because you carry weight,* the Monarch replied, her tone neither cruel nor kind. "And in the Abyss, weight draws gravity. Now, all the sheep below will feel your steps."
With those final words, the Monarch turned and vanished into the dark sky above, rising like most, until only silence remained.
For some time, Aelric stood motionless, the brand on his chest pulsing faintly. The pain faded, replaced by a sense of tethering, as though invisible chains now bound him to something very vast and incomprehensible.
Veyra stepped forward, eyes unreadable. "You should know what that mark means. You are a threat now, Aelric. Part of a design you can't see yet."
"I don't care about designs," he said, voice low. "I came to tear out the roots of Flesh Architect. Everything else is just noise."
But he knew it wasn't true. The deeper he went, the more it became clear that his journey wasn't about vengeance or finding out about his past or anything. The Abyss was changing him inside out, molding him, or perhaps revealing him. He didn't know which was worse.
The Voice was silent for a long time, then finally spoke.
[From this point onwards, Aelric, there will be no allies. Only monsters who are more honest about what they are."]
He looked ahead. The path before then was no longer stone or sinew but an endless descent, a spiraling staircase carved from bone, leading into deeper blackness.
Whispers echoed from below, ancient and hungry. In the distance, he saw lights green, gold, and red flickering like lighthouses in the dark. Each could be a beacon of hope or a trap.
This is where the real change in the realm happens. Aelric looked up, seeing many visions of the first realm, the ruins of the city he had survived, the chains on his arms, meeting the demon and the silent Monarch.
He took the first step down. The Abyss welcomed him like a returning son.
The threshold between the first and second layer of the Abyss was not a gate, not a chasm, not even a rift, but a feeling. It began with the slowing of breath.
After a long time, Aelric finally descended. He stood upon the cracked obsidian stone, the ghostly ruins of the Hollow Crown whispering behind him like a forgotten fever dream.
The mark left by the Silent Monarch pulsed upon his back unseen, getting heavy, like a phantom brand burned into the core of his being.
Each step forward dragged the world into unfamiliarity, as if time no longer cared to follow its own rules. The path before him wasn't carved, but summoned stone shaping itself beneath his feet, whispering its welcome in a land which he couldn't understand.
Veyra stood beside him, unusually quiet. The flickering strands of her hair shifted like ink suspended in water, her limbs trembling faintly in the suffocating air. The Voice, too, has gone silent. No commentary. No warnings. Just the presence of deep, observing and calculating.
Then the world shifted. Aelric gasped, eyes snapping wide. The ground beneath sath hun disappeared. There was no fall nor a motion, just an instantaneous elsewhere.
Aelric didn't know what was happening; it was as if Abyss was playing with him.
The real second layer of the Abyss greeted him with a sky aflame.
It churned overhead, a swirling miasma of crimson storms, laced with violet lightning that did not strike. But twisted in the air like living serpents.
The sky had no sun or moon, only a blood colored wound stretching across its firmament, weeping fire and shadow.
The horizon bent inward, like the world itself was folding in on him. A new pressure settled over his shoulders, thicker than gravity, weightier than despair. The air was viscous, clinging to skin and soil alike.
[Welcome,] the voice finally said, its tone more distant than before, [to the second layer; the Chained Wastes.]
The ground here was nothing like the first layer. There were no roots or decay, only rusted earth and endless plains of ash.
Bones massive and ancient protruded from the cracked crystal of the realm like the ribs of buried gods. Some of them seemed to move and twitch, making sounds.
Chains stretched across the sky, titanic, rusted links that seemed to defy physics. They dangled from nothing, twisted around pillars of bone and monoliths of forgotten stone, vanishing into the clouds.
Others were embedded in the ground, anchoring the earth to something above.
"Those chains hold more than stone," Veyra whispered, voice barely audible. "They hold memories, regret and prisoners too ancient to name. At least that's what those people said."
She stepped lightly, each movement cautious. Aelric followed, his instincts screaming even as his mind attempted to catalog what he saw.
A massive skeletal creature, its head cracked open and filled with black mist, lay crushed beneath five interwoven chains, each as wide as a house.
Its eye sockets still glowed faintly with embers, and the air around it trembled with residual hatred. The chains pulsed, and if feeding on the last fragments of life within it.
"Is it…dead?" Aelric asked.
"No," Veyra said, her voice hollow. 'Nothing truly dies in this place. Not unless the Abyss itself allows it."
He knelt beside the creature, brushing the edge of its ribcage. A tremor surged through him, memories not of his own. A battlefield, screams, shackles forged from screams and despair, he retrieved his hands, eyes burning.
"I felt its rage," he muttered.
The Voice spoke again, colder now. [This later is remembered. The dead echo. Be wary where you step, every corpse may yet have a voice.]
Aelric rose, tightening the Soulbound shackles around his forearms. The chains hummed, reacting to the environment as if thirsting for the latent power lingering in the ash.
He activated his Devourer's Bloom cautiously, the tendrils slithering across the surface of his skin before retracting. He felt something unnatural, so he withdrew his power. Even that minor exertion of power has drawn attention.