*Day 7 - Between ruins and nowhere*
They found the road by accident.
Ora had been following a deer path through broken forest, Kaelen stumbling behind her, when the trees just... stopped. Not burned. Not cut. They simply ended in a perfect line, as if reality had drawn a boundary and said: "No further."
Beyond that line stretched black glass.
Not obsidian. Not crystal. Something else. A road forty feet wide that cut through the landscape like a scar, disappearing into mountains that should have been impassable. The surface was seamless—no blocks, no joints, no evidence it had been built at all. It simply was.
"That's not possible," Kaelen breathed.
Ora stepped onto it. The moment her foot touched the surface, she felt it—a hum that bypassed her ears and went straight to her bones.
They were entering the Corridor of Unspoken Dreams, where the Shapers had accidentally crystallized the space between sleeping and waking. Here, thoughts you had just before falling asleep became semi-real, walking alongside you as translucent companions. Ora saw herself as a child, wondering if Mother loved Lyra more. Kaelen saw himself succeeding where he'd failed, a ghost of competence he'd never achieved. The corruption in her veins recoiled, then surged forward, drawn to something in the road's substance.
"It's warm," she said. The contrast was sharp—her body had dropped to five degrees below normal now, cold enough that her breath misted even in daylight. After days of walking on cold earth and colder stone, the road's warmth should have been welcome. It wasn't. This was the warmth of something alive. Something watching. Against her frozen skin, it felt like touching fever.
Kaelen knelt, running his hand along the surface. "No tool marks. No weathering. This has been here..." He paused, calculating. "The erosion patterns on the surrounding rock suggest at least ten thousand years. But this looks like it was made yesterday."
"The Shapers."
"Has to be. But why build a road here? This route doesn't connect anything important."
Ora walked to the edge where the road met earth. The boundary was perfect—a line so straight it hurt to look at. Grass grew right up to the edge but not a blade crossed over. Insects landed on the dirt, took off, but wouldn't fly over the black surface.
"Maybe it connected things that aren't important anymore," she said. "Or things that stopped existing."
They followed it because the alternative was cutting through marsh—specifically the Bog of Borrowed Time, where every second you saved by taking a shortcut was stolen from your future. Travelers emerged from it younger but with less life ahead. The road might be dangerous, but at least it didn't steal your years. The road never varied—forty feet wide, perfectly flat, cutting through terrain that should have stopped it. When it met a mountain, it went through. Not around. Through. A tunnel of the same black glass, lit by its own faint luminescence.
Inside the tunnel, the hum grew stronger.
"Look at this," Kaelen pointed to the walls. Symbols. Not carved—they seemed to exist within the glass itself, visible only at certain angles. They hurt to read, not because they were complex but because they were simple. Too simple. Like someone had reduced language to its absolute mathematical minimum.
"Can you read them?" Ora asked.
"No. But..." He traced one with his finger, careful not to touch. "They repeat. See? Every hundred meters, the same sequence."
"Like a warning?"
"Or instructions. Or..." He stopped. "Or a prayer."
They walked in silence after that. The tunnel went on for three miles, straight as an arrow through solid rock. When they finally emerged, the sun was setting, turning the black road ahead into a river of reflected fire.
That's when they saw the tower.
It rose from the road itself, seamless, as if the road had decided to grow upward for five hundred feet. Same material. Same impossible perfection. No doors. No windows. Just a needle of black glass pointing at the sky like an accusation.
"We should go around," Kaelen said.
"We should." Ora kept walking toward it. "But we won't."
As they approached, the tower began to sing. Not music—mathematics. Pure frequency that made reality hiccup. Ora's corrupted Vital Echo went haywire, showing her overlapping versions of the tower. In one, it was new. In another, it was ruins. In a third, it was something else entirely—a thing with too many angles that her mind refused to process.
The sound made the ash taste in her mouth intensify, mixing with something metallic—the flavor of time itself bending. Colors bled further from her vision; the sunset that should have been orange was now a sickly gray-yellow.
"Ora, your nose—"
Blood. She wiped it away, and it was cold on her fingers, already starting to freeze. "I'm fine."
"You're not. This thing is—"
The tower opened. Not a door—the surface simply became permeable, like black water they could walk through.
Inside was worse.
The space was bigger than the tower could contain. They had entered a Pocket of Compressed Joy—the Shapers had tried to store happiness here, to save it for darker times. But joy compressed becomes mania. The walls wept liquid ecstasy that burned like acid. The air tasted sweet enough to rot teeth. Too much of any emotion, even positive ones, became poison when concentrated. Walls covered in more symbols, but these moved, crawling across the surface like living things. In the center, a sphere of something that wasn't quite solid, wasn't quite liquid, wasn't quite light. It pulsed with the same rhythm as the road's hum.
"It's a heart," Ora said. "Or an engine. Or both."
"It's a mistake," said a new voice.
They spun. In the entrance stood a figure in robes that seemed to be cut from shadow. Not black—absence. Where it stood, light simply gave up.
"Shaitana," Kaelen whispered.
"The very same." She glided forward, and the symbols on the walls fled from her presence. "You've found one of their anchor points. The Shapers built these to hold reality in place. To ensure their design remained stable across millennia."
"What happened to them?" Ora asked.
"They achieved perfection." Shaitana's laugh was winter wind through graveyards. "Perfect order. Perfect control. Perfect stasis. They won, you see. Conquered everything. Controlled everything. And in doing so, they ceased to exist. Because perfect things don't change, and things that don't change aren't alive."
"But their roads remain."
"Their roads. Their towers. Their mistakes." She gestured at the sphere. "This is one of their hearts. Still beating after ten thousand years. Still trying to impose order on a universe that has moved on. The Distillers found these things. Studied them. Decided the Shapers had the right idea but the wrong execution."
"The old stories say the world began with an argument," Ora said, remembering her mother's tales. "Two forces that couldn't coexist."
"Not stories. History. The Shapers were trying to resolve that argument. They chose stasis over entropy. Perfect order." Shaitana's smile was winter. "They lost by winning."
"So they're trying again."
"With improvements. The Shapers made everything perfect and static. The Distillers will make everything perfect and evolving. Constantly breaking down and rebuilding. Forever becoming but never being." She touched the sphere, and it screamed—a sound like glass being born. "Both are prisons. Just different architectures."
"Why show us this?" Kaelen asked.
"Because you need to understand what you're fighting. Not just the Distillers. The legacy they're building on. The road you're walking leads to places the Shapers built and abandoned. Each one holds a piece of the puzzle. Each one will cost you something to understand."
She turned to leave, then paused. "Oh, and don't sleep on the road. It remembers what walks on it. And after midnight, it sometimes dreams."
"Dreams what?"
"The world the Shapers intended. Trust me, you don't want to be there when it does."
She vanished, leaving them alone with the sphere and its mathematical heartbeat.
They left the tower quickly, but stayed on the road. As night fell, they made camp thirty feet from its edge, close enough to use its light but far enough to avoid its dreams.
"We could have lived our whole lives without knowing this existed," Kaelen said, staring at the road's soft glow.
"But now we can't unknow it." Ora lay back, watching stars appear. "That's the real curse. Not the corruption in my veins. Not the death of Crysillia. It's knowing that everything we thought was natural is just someone else's abandoned architecture."
"The Shapers built the world?"
"No. They rebuilt it. Into something useful for them. Then they left or died or became something else, and we've been living in their ruins thinking it was nature." She laughed, bitter. "We're not children of the gods. We're rats in an abandoned house."
"Poetic."
"True."
That night, exactly at midnight, the road began to dream.
This was the Hour of Frozen Ambition, when the road remembered what the Shapers had wanted to build before perfection consumed them. The air itself became thick with abandoned desires—cities that touched the stars, beings that never aged, love that never faded. All of it perfect. All of it dead. The weight of unrealized dreams pressed down like atmosphere from a denser world. They watched from their camp as reality on the black glass shifted. Ghost buildings rose—structures of impossible geometry. Figures moved through them, but wrong. Too tall. Too many joints. They moved in perfect synchronization, thousands of them, like a single organism pretending to be many.
The Shapers, as they had been. Before their perfection consumed them.
"That's what the Distillers want to bring back?" Kaelen whispered.
"No." Ora watched the ghost city pulse with mechanical precision. "They want to improve it."
The vision lasted exactly one hour. Then the road went dark, returning to its soft, waiting glow.
They didn't sleep that night.
In the morning, they left the road, cutting through marshland rather than follow it further. But they could still see it from miles away—that perfect black line through imperfect nature.
It cut through the Hills of Accumulated Doubt, where every uncertainty had piled up like sediment until it formed a landscape. Walking there meant confronting every decision you'd ever questioned. Beyond that, the road entered the Valley of Other People's Disappointments, where the weight of letting others down had carved a canyon so deep that light couldn't reach the bottom. Waiting. Remembering. Dreaming of a world that had been killed by its own perfection.
And in her pocket, the tainted coin pulsed in rhythm with the road's abandoned heart.
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*End Chapter 6.5*
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