The pool of blood hissed and frothed as if something ancient had stirred awake within it.
It wasn't just heat that made it boil—it was warning. The air thickened with copper and smoke, the steam curling with an unnatural rhythm, as though the pool itself were trying to cry out. Every droplet that clung to the rocks seemed to vibrate. Whisper.
Alpas sat still in its center, half-submerged, his breath shallow. The warmth that had soothed his wounds mere moments ago now felt like a fever. His limbs no longer throbbed with pain; they felt detached—light, boneless, as though they no longer belonged to him.
But his chest—his chest bore the weight of something immense. Not physical. Not even emotional. Something else. As if an eye had opened in the hollow of his ribs and had begun... looking.
At first, he didn't notice the silence.
Then he did.
The boy beside him, who had moments ago muttered fears about the pool's gaze—was still.
Utterly still.
Alpas turned his head, slowly, as though fearing the world might break at the wrong movement. The boy's body floated limply, face tilted toward the sky, eyes wide open—and empty. Not panicked. Not peaceful. Just... gone.
Then another boy gasped, clutched his throat, and collapsed. Then a girl. Then another. Their skin withered, sunken, drained of fluid, their limbs curling in on themselves like scorched paper.
Alpas froze in horror, his eyes darting from body to body as one by one, they fell around him, limbs twitching, mouths agape in silent screams. The pool was no longer red, but black in places—thick and churning, as if tar had been poured into its depths.
Screaming broke through the fog.
The others in the water scrambled back, slipping and shrieking, trying to claw their way out. Some slipped on the obsidian rocks. Others tore at each other in blind panic. And all of them—all of them—looked at him.
Alpas.
The boy in the center.
The one the water hadn't touched.
"No… No—I didn't…" His voice was barely a whisper. He stared down at his hands beneath the surface, watching the faint shimmer that trailed off his skin—light not reflected, but devoured.
Shadows coiled from his fingertips, soft and slow like ink blooming in warm milk. They curled lazily in the water, but Alpas could feel them reaching. Feeding.
His chest heaved. He couldn't breathe.
"I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to do anything…"
But the pool moved in response, rippling outward like a heartbeat. Like acknowledgment.
From the edge of the gorge, alarms rang. Horns. Commands. The Ironward, stood pale and frozen—his eyes locked on the drained corpses and the boy at the center. His hands trembled. It was a scene he hadn't seen before.
This—this wasn't in any training.
He turned, bolted toward the camp. Toward the war tent. Toward her.
From the scorched walls of the training camp, Sereth Milhiram did not wait for words.
She saw the bodies, and the center of the pool.
The boy.
Alpas.
Something coiled around him that did not belong to this world. A weightless gravity, a presence that bent the very undersong—the resonant hum of essence that only Kalaguns could hear. And right now, it screamed.
Sereth's armor sang with every name etched into it as she moved, the sound like blades whispering in a forge. Her feet burned as she launched from the ledge, descending in a streak of fire and molten steel, like a red sun.
Alpas didn't see her clearly.
What he saw was pressure.
A wall of intent and flame hurling toward him, faster than he could think.
And then—
"Dive."
A voice.
Not his. Not human. Not kind.
It echoed through his marrow like an instinct unearthed. The command didn't come from his mind—it came from below. From the name carved into his bone. From the void that had begun to bloom in his heart.
His body moved.
Without understanding. Without resistance.
He plunged beneath the blood.
And the pool, impossibly deep, welcomed him.
It swallowed him like breath in a drowning lung.
By the time Sereth Milhiram struck the basin, blade drawn, fire roaring behind her, the surface was still again.
The corpses floated. The living shivered.
And the boy was gone.
She stood at the edge of the blood pool, blade still humming with heat, steam rising off its edge in long, trembling wisps.
Around her, the survivors wept or whimpered, too dazed to flee. Some simply stared into the blood, as if expecting more bodies to surface. But there were no more movements. Only the slow churn of the corrupted pool and the grotesque stillness of the dead.
Sereth didn't speak.
Her weapon lowered—but only slightly—as she scanned the surface, the dark reflection of her warplate fractured by blood and shadow.
She had moved too slowly.
Too slowly.
Her heart thundered—not from battle, but from that voice. The one she had heard through the pool's scream. Not aloud, but within the undersong. A note that did not belong to this world. It pulsed wrong—too ancient, too fundamental, as if echoing from before the first wall was ever built.
She should have killed him.
The thought came not with malice—but with grief. And clarity.
She closed her eyes.
I saw it in him the moment he stepped into the circle, she thought. That boy… Alpas. Something coiled inside him, tight and silent, like a spiral made of absence. A pull that ignored the rules of essence, of blood, of law.
That made it worse.
Whatever had awakened in that boy—it hadn't been summoned. It hadn't been earned. It had chosen him. Slipped into him like shadow into a wound.
And now he was gone. Sunk beneath the blood and stone. Hidden.
Waiting.
"I'm going to the Inner Walls," Sereth said, voice low.
The Ironward jolted like he'd been struck. "What? General—no! We're at war! The king—he stationed you here by decree! You're a Wanderer, your presence holds the line—"
"I've served the king since I earned that name," she interrupted. "Since I crossed the 199th threshold and returned to keep this crumbling husk breathing."
She stepped forward, and the earth seemed to recoil from her weight. Her warplate hissed with heat.
"I paid my family's debt in blood, in years, and I swore no oath to the outer walls. Only to the truth."
She stared into the center of the pool again, where Alpas had vanished.
"You think this war matters?" Her voice was quiet now. "Let the outer walls rot. They are nothing compared to what lies within."
She turned to the Ironward, eyes burning like coals. "Whatever has latched onto that boy—whatever has begun to move through him—won't stay here. It will reach. It will pull. And when it does, even the 199 walls won't contain it."
Then she sheathed her sword and walked.
No one stopped her.
No one dared.
Because in Darakhul, a Wanderer did not need permission.
Especially not when the world had just changed.
Forever.