The boat cut through the steel-gray waters of the Southern Ocean, its hull cracking chunks of floating ice as the wind screamed over the deck.
Inside the ship's lower hold, the shouting didn't stop.
Six voices. Four men. Two women. All arguing over the same thing.
"Why the hell do you get to lead?"
"Because I'm the only one here who's mapped the blackout zone."
"Bullshit! You mapped ice."
"It's not just ice! We're sitting on a threshold. If we find that damn city—"
"Then what? The government's already dust. Who you gonna report to, a corpse in a suit?"
The room reeked of sweat, diesel, and desperation. No one trusted each other. Not after what happened in South America. Not after Menystria became a whisper everyone pretended wasn't real.
Up above, on the outer deck, just outside the captain's wheelhouse, a blonde woman stood alone.
Coat zipped. Hair tied back. Recorder in hand.
The captain?
Knocked out cold inside the cabin. Nothing lethal—just something to keep him quiet.
She clicked the recorder on.
"This is Caroline Mendacium," she said, voice calm, sharp.
"Private entry. July second. Temperature's currently somewhere between fuck-freezing and divine punishment."
She exhaled, eyes narrowing toward the southern horizon.
"I've hijacked an expedition. Not proud of it. Necessary."
Behind her, the shouting continued.
"They're arguing over who gets to be famous when we find whatever the satellites blacked out last month. I'm guessing they haven't noticed I drugged the navigation override."
She checked her notes, flipping through a small weather-warped journal.
"Coordinates are holding. If the distortion doesn't shift again, we'll be within the anomaly radius by morning."
Pause.
"This might be nothing. A hole in the snow. A broken gate. Another frozen mystery for people to fight over."
She turned off the recorder.
Then muttered, mostly to herself:
"But if it's not... I want to be the one who walks through it first."
The boat slowed as it neared the edge of the blackout zone.
Caroline stepped up onto the starboard rail, wind cutting across her face as a massive shelf of broken ice came into view—jagged, sloped, wide enough to walk on. It wasn't land, not really. Just frozen surface. But it would do.
Behind her, the shouting below deck hadn't stopped. Still arguing. Still too loud to notice her footsteps.
She moved quickly.
From the side pocket of her bag, she pulled a small metal box, thumb brushing across the raised button on top.
She'd prepared for this.
Couldn't risk the others following her. Couldn't risk being reported to whatever passed for authority now. Police? Military? Cult? She didn't know. Didn't care.
She dropped the box down the stairs into the lower hold.
A soft hiss followed.
By the time the gas filled the room, she was already at the wheel.
One hand turned the ship's direction back toward open ocean. The other set the speed low—enough to drift, not crash.
Then she stepped up onto the railing again.
A breath.
A leap.
Boots hit ice.
Hard, but steady.
She didn't look back.
Only forward.
Wind howled behind her as the boat drifted away, slow and empty.
Caroline Mendacium was alone.
Exactly how she planned it.
She walked.
Snow cracked under each step. Winds shifted between her shoulders like whispers too tired to form words. The terrain was uneven—low hills, half-buried rock, wind-beaten ice. Cold enough to sting the lungs, quiet enough to hear her own heartbeat.
It wasn't much to look at.
But she hadn't expected anything more.
Some part of her knew this could be a waste. Just another rumor born in the ashes of a world falling apart. One more "divine blackout" filed alongside collapsing governments and magic cults claiming they'd seen the end times.
Still, she walked.
Because the boat was gone.
Because she'd burned the bridge behind her before checking if the leap made sense.
If she turned back, she'd die in the water. Hypothermia didn't forgive impulsive researchers.
She adjusted the strap on her bag and pressed forward.
Eventually, the terrain changed.
Snow gave way to trees—tall, spindly pines, frost-laced but alive. A forest. Sparse, but standing. The kind she didn't expect to find out here. Not in a dead zone. Not in territory that wasn't supposed to grow anything anymore.
She stepped between the trunks carefully, boots sinking less now, the wind blocked by the canopy overhead.
Cold, yes. But…
It felt cozy.
Familiar.
She remembered walking through places like this with her parents. Old woods—back when there were still any left that humanity hadn't stripped clean. Forests untouched by progress. Forgotten by maps.
Caroline paused, brushing a hand along the bark of a crooked tree.
She wondered, briefly, how humanity had ever advanced so quickly.
And why they always made sure to leave nothing behind when they did.
She pressed on.
Step by step, boots cracking through shallow layers of frost. Trees bent under the weight of snow, their branches curling low like they were trying to whisper something she couldn't hear. Everything around her looked the same—bushes half-buried, rocks blanketed in white, terrain soft and uneven.
Nothing stood out.
No ruins. No gate. No glow in the distance.
The longer she walked, the more ridiculous it all felt. The rumor. The anomaly. This idea that gods had a place—a city—that started the war, that cracked the sky open and flooded the world with oaths and monsters and divine temper tantrums.
She muttered under her breath, pulling her coat tighter.
And then she saw it.
A road.
Cutting through the forest like a scar. Clean. Perfect.
No snow on it.
Not a single patch of ice.
As if someone had melted the frost off just moments before she arrived. The trees on either side didn't grow across it. The air above it was still—dead still. No wind. No sound.
It went straight.
Far too straight.
From one end of the horizon to the other, disappearing into fog that didn't look natural. She couldn't see where it began or ended.
Maybe distance.
Maybe something else.
She turned left and followed it.
No logic to the choice—just instinct.
It was the first thing she'd seen that wasn't chaos. That wasn't indifferent nature.
A road meant intention.
A path meant someone had walked it before her.
And if this so-called blacksite was real, if it was hidden anywhere in this frozen wasteland—
It would be at the end of a road like this.
She stayed on the road.
Nothing changed.
Cold. Fog. Silence.
Even the forest didn't make noise—not a bird, not a shift in the branches. No animals. No wind. If this had been anywhere else, she would've been scared something was waiting to jump out from behind a tree.
Here?
She was almost sure there was nothing left alive at all.
And that might've been worse.
She didn't know how long she walked.
Two miles. Six. Maybe more. Time stopped tracking itself. The only reminder it existed at all was how deep the cold had settled into her skin.
Then—something changed.
The trees ended.
Not the road—it kept going, perfectly straight, cutting forward into the fog like a blade.
But the forest only remained on her right.
To the left, it was gone.
No thinning. No gradual change. Just... gone.
A wide-open clearing stretched out for what felt like miles. No snowdrifts, no brush, no stumps. As if someone had carved the forest off the face of the earth and forgot to leave a scar.
She slowed, stepping slightly off the road to get a better view.
Still nothing.
Not a single tree.
Just space.
And somehow, that was more unnatural than anything she'd seen.
Caroline frowned, adjusting the strap on her bag.
The government always said Antarctica was unlivable. Too cold, too dangerous. "Hell on Earth," they called it. "Humans weren't meant to be here."
But maybe that wasn't the reason.
Maybe it wasn't about the cold.
Maybe it was about what used to live here.
She stepped into the clearing.
Slowly. Carefully.
Not because she knew something was wrong—but because her body did. That quiet, buried part of her brain that had stopped trusting her own instincts miles ago.
Maybe it was the cold getting to her.
Maybe she was paranoid.
Or maybe—just maybe—something really wasn't right.
She crouched and brushed her glove against the snow.
Normal. Cold. Powdery.
Then she reached out, feeling around the open air beside her, just in case.
Her fingers touched something solid.
She froze.
Not wood. Not bark. Not any natural texture she recognized.
It felt somewhere between metal and gemstone—smooth, dense, impossibly cold. And yet she couldn't see anything. The clearing looked the same. No structure. No shimmer. Just open air.
She tapped it lightly.
Nothing.
Punched it, just once, hoping to break the illusion—
And then she heard it.
A footstep behind her.
She turned faster than she ever had in her life.
And stopped.
There, only a few feet away, stood a figure.
Tall. Still. Holding a blade taller than itself—its edge dragging lightly against the frozen ground.
Its skin was white. Not pale. Not frostbitten. White like the world had forgotten to paint it in.
A long coat covered its form, with a high collar and a heavy cape that trailed behind it. Fur wrapped around its neck. A black turtleneck underneath.
Curled horns spiraled from its head, slipping through hair that moved gently despite the windless air.
A blindfold—black, clean—covered its eyes.
It didn't speak.
Didn't move.
Didn't even breathe.
It just stood there.
Watching her.
The figure raised its blade.
The edge stopped just below her chin—close enough to feel the cold hum of it vibrating against her skin.
Then it spoke.
A voice like ice over water, layered and low.
"What are you doing here?"
It didn't blink.
"Do you know where you stand?"
She couldn't answer at first.
Every part of her wanted to run. Or kneel. Or scream. Or stop breathing entirely.
It felt like a thousand voices whispered in her skull at once—leave, kneel, you've gone too far, don't breathe, breathe now or die.
But she forced her mouth to move.
"Caroline," she said. "My name is… Caroline."
Nothing else.
Just her name.
And somehow, it was enough.
The blade dissolved into nothing—no clatter, no mist, just gone.
The figure lowered its arm.
Then stepped past her.
It didn't walk like a man. It didn't move like a monster. It just shifted weight—slow, smooth—and leaned its elbow against what looked like empty air.
And suddenly, it wasn't empty.
The space beneath its arm shimmered, then hardened.
Light-gray metal bloomed into shape—flat, reflective, structured. Not man-made. Not even close. The metal curved into a massive gate, etched with mechanical wheels, glowing circuits, and designs too elegant to be human.
No scorch marks.
No seams.
No explanation.
Behind the gate, the illusion continued to fall away.
Mountains.
Not small ones—impossible ones.
They rose on either side of the gate, arching upward and outward like curved fangs. High enough to disappear into the sky. High enough to trap her inside their shadow.
She realized the "clearing" hadn't been a clearing at all.
It had been a crater. A basin.
Surrounded by a mountain ring too steep, too smooth—too sheer—to climb.
There was no way anyone walked here by accident.
No way anyone left by foot.
She stared at the gate. At the impossible craftsmanship. At the sheer presence of it.
And then the figure spoke again.
Only one word.
"Evodil."
She stared at him.
The word hung in her head.
Evodil.
Was it the name of the gate?
This place?
Him?
She swallowed, her voice barely working.
"Evodil… is that… is that your name?"
The figure didn't respond.
But something in the air shifted.
The wind slowed.
The fog lifted just enough for her to see more of his face beneath the blindfold—his jawline sharp, skin pale, definitely human.
A man.
That much was clear.
He tilted his head slightly. Not answering. Just judging the question like it didn't deserve an answer at all.
And then he smirked.
Not kindly.
Not cruelly.
Just enough to make her feel stupid.
Then he turned back to the gate and placed both hands against it.
The metal groaned—low, deep, ancient.
The sound echoed through the clearing like a canyon collapsing in reverse, stone dragging across stone. It wasn't just loud—it felt old. Like the gate remembered being closed for too long.
The doors pushed inward.
He stepped through.
She hesitated.
"Wait—can I—can I come with you?"
The man paused.
Turned slightly.
"Do I look like I'm from charity?"
He reached for the door.
She panicked.
"Please!" she shouted. "I'll die out here! I—I have no food, no radio—I'll freeze to death!"
Her voice cracked on the last word.
He sighed. Loud. Exaggerated.
Like she'd just asked him to carry her groceries.
Then, without a word, he grabbed her elbow and yanked her inside.
The gate closed behind them.
Hard.
She hit the ground hard.
Not ice.
Not snow.
Grass.
Purple.
She scrambled to her feet fast, brushing her coat off like it made a difference. The figure didn't look at her. Didn't acknowledge her fall. Just stood there, like the world still worked the way he wanted it to.
She looked around.
And immediately forgot how to think.
It wasn't Antarctica anymore.
They were at the edge of something massive—something vast and unnatural. The wind was gone. The cold faded. The fog behind her might as well have never existed.
In its place was... this.
The sky overhead glowed dimly, not from a sun, but from something deeper. Mountains encircled the land like sharpened blades, jagged and precise, too steep to climb, too smooth to be natural.
The ground stretched out below her in sprawling colors—purples, blues, faint bioluminescence coiling through the vegetation like veins of forgotten light.
And in the distance, structures rose from the earth like scars—towers of black and gray stone twisted by design, not erosion. Monuments built for something more than shelter. Something divine.
Caroline turned in a slow circle, trying to process the scale of it all.
This wasn't made by man.
It was too big. Too angry. Too deliberate.
It felt like a warning to something that had already been destroyed.
She stared upward as floating landmasses drifted lazily through the air—entire islands hung by nothing, dotted with glowing trees, strange buildings, and terrain shaped like it had been ripped from other worlds.
"...what the hell is this place?" she muttered.
The man beside her didn't answer.
Didn't need to.
This was his house.
And she had just broken in through the front door.
She turned toward him, still trying to catch her breath, brain spinning faster than her legs could keep up.
"What is this place?" she asked. "Is this—did you—who built—"
She reached for her recorder.
That was her mistake.
A sharp sound snapped behind her.
Something lashed out—fast and fluid. A tendril. Long and dark, extending from the man's back like it had always been there, waiting. It coiled around her hood and yanked her off the ground like she weighed nothing.
Her feet kicked air.
She barely had time to yell.
Then came the voice, low and clear.
"If the others find you," he said, "I'm telling them you broke in."
She froze.
His tone didn't sound angry. Just… annoyed. Like he'd already decided what excuse to use and didn't plan on revisiting it.
He continued.
"I won't kill you. Not unless you start being an ass like James, or boring like Noah."
She didn't know who either of those people were.
He didn't care.
"And if you have questions," he added, "you can ask them once we're inside the manor. Otherwise, don't waste my time."
She nodded quickly, still dangling in the air, hands gripping the cord of her bag like it could protect her from anything he might do next.
No words came out of her mouth. Just air.
Whatever was going on, it was bigger than anything she was prepared for.
But at least now she knew one thing for sure.
The blacksite was real.
And she was standing in the middle of it.
He didn't speak.
He just walked.
Not quickly. Not slowly. Just forward, as if the world would adjust to his pace and not the other way around.
She followed.
Or tried to.
Bridge to bridge. Island to island. She kept her eyes on the black coat, the shifting cape, the figure that never once looked back to see if she was still behind him.
The islands weren't natural. Nothing here was.
Stone suspended in sky. Glowing veins of energy threading through the rock beneath her boots. Everything floated—perfectly still, like gravity had been told to sit down and shut up.
Buildings appeared on either side of them as they moved. Empty, quiet things—some shaped like towers, others like temples, others still like nothing she could name. They passed a monument in the shape of a star. Another shaped like a crescent sun. Another: a hollow moon cradled in chains.
She didn't ask questions.
She barely had the breath to keep moving.
Shades moved around them. Not the monsters she'd seen on broadcasts. Not the ones that tore through cities when Oathbound failed. These were... people.
Sort of.
They wore coats. Gloves. Some in aprons. One behind a shop window adjusting something in a case. Another sweeping the steps outside a storefront with dark-glass windows and paper signs pinned inside.
None of them looked at her.
None of them cared.
This place wasn't hostile.
It was functioning.
Civilized.
Built from shadows and silence—but no less alive.
She jogged across another bridge, stumbling slightly at the slope, and looked up just in time to see where they were heading.
The structure at the far end of the island didn't rise—it loomed.
White. Towering. Immovable.
Like the world itself had formed a spine and this was where it ended.
The gate ahead wasn't guarded. It didn't need to be.
It radiated finality.
He stopped just short of the gate.
Didn't look back—just said it flatly, like it was a routine warning he'd given a thousand times.
"Stay right behind me. Or you'll get fried."
She didn't ask what that meant.
Didn't need to.
She closed the distance in two steps, pressing close enough to touch his back—coat rough beneath her gloves, cold like it had never known skin or warmth.
The gate ahead pulsed with light.
It didn't glow like a torch or a screen. It burned. The kind of heat that lived in wrongness—the air-before-lightning kind, the instant-before-lava kind. Every instinct told her to turn and run, but her legs didn't listen.
They walked forward.
The moment they passed through, the heat vanished.
So did the light.
And then they were inside.
She blinked.
The shift was too fast. Too smooth.
The room that unfolded around them didn't feel like a building—it felt like a challenge.
Stone. Pillars. Walkways suspended over massive gaps. The ceiling stretched so high she wasn't sure it existed. Shadows curled along the edges of every wall, shaped more by absence than light.
The place was massive.
Wider than any government facility she'd ever snuck into.
And emptier.
No guards. No machines humming. No boots. No echoes of voices or commands.
Just silence.
Even he looked surprised.
He let out a low whistle, stepping forward.
"No James. No Jasper," he muttered. "Guess I'm lucky today."
She stood behind him, still catching her breath, coat still trembling slightly from the gate's heat.
He didn't acknowledge her.
Didn't even turn his head.
Just kept walking, like this was his home, and she was a coat rack that wandered in behind him.
They crossed to the far side of the citadel.
No more pillars. No strange echoes. Just another threshold.
This one didn't look like much.
No glowing runes. No symbols carved in gold. Just an empty archway—simple, white stone, cracked in places like it hadn't been touched in decades.
But beyond it?
A bridge.
It stretched forward into nothing, thin and pale, built of white metal with strange patches of concrete beneath the supports. Like someone couldn't decide what era they were designing for. It hung over a drop that went on forever.
Evodil stepped onto it, hands in his coat pockets.
Then he turned, eyes hidden still behind the blindfold.
"Find your way to the end," he said.
And vanished.
No flash. No sound. Just gone.
Caroline froze.
She stared at the place where he'd stood—feet planted in the middle of the bridge. Nothing. No trace. No footprints.
He'd left her.
No warning. No explanation.
Just a command.
She turned toward the side of the bridge and looked over.
Nothing.
No bottom.
Just darkness. Real darkness—the kind that didn't reflect light, didn't move, didn't make space for you to exist in it. If she slipped, she wouldn't fall.
She'd vanish.
She took a step back.
And then she heard it.
A sound—wet and sharp—like snakes dragging themselves across tile, like hair brushing against metal in a room that was too quiet.
At first, there was nothing to see.
Just noise.
Then the tendrils came.
Thousands of them. Maybe millions.
Slithering up the walls of the citadel, curling around the bridge supports, crawling toward her in patterns that didn't make sense—like something was dreaming them into being one thought at a time.
Her chest locked.
She didn't wait to see what they wanted.
She ran.
No hesitation.
Just forward.
Like he told her.
Like her life depended on it.
Because it probably did.
She wasn't about to test what happened if she stopped.
She ran.
Fast, hard, lungs already freezing over. The bridge behind her blurred, tendrils still crawling slow and steady, the citadel shrinking behind her as she pushed forward like hell was two steps behind.
The lamps flickered.
Not one or two—all of them.
The light stuttered in sequence, as if something was breathing through the wiring. Darkness followed with every blink, eating her steps one at a time.
Then she heard the clatter.
Her recorder.
It slipped from her coat mid-run, bounced once—twice—and dropped.
Straight into the void.
She didn't stop.
Didn't curse out loud.
Just grit her teeth and kept moving.
Gravity won that fight. She had bigger ones to deal with.
And just when her chest started locking—when her knees started to betray her and her breath turned to blades—
She saw it.
Dark oak doors.
Embedded into the side of one of the mountains that curled around the edge of this impossible place.
Windows framed the outer wall, soft yellow light glowing through old glass. A slate of pale concrete held the frame, supported by crooked columns reaching up into a structure above—a sphere, gray and glass-paned, perched like an eye.
An observatory?
Maybe.
Didn't matter.
She reached the doors.
Grabbed the handle.
Twisted.
And pushed into the manor.
Chairs lined both sides of the entrance, angled just wrong, like they refused to be symmetrical no matter how often someone tried.
Paintings hung crooked. Skies. Trees. Stones that glowed wrong. The kind of art that didn't settle in your head the right way.
And there, on one of the chairs.
Sitting casually.
One leg crossed.
A cup steaming in his hand.
Evodil.
Hand in his coat pocket.
Not looking at her.
Not reacting.
Just sipping.
Like none of that just happened.