Cel's eyes snapped open.
The ravine walls rose on either side, framing a narrow strip of crimson sky - red fading to burnt orange at the edges, offering light without a source. No sun. No moon. Just the hollow glow of a world that had died long ago.
He was back.
Back in the Hollow Realms.
Cel pushed himself upright. His body moved smoothly - too smoothly. No trembling weakness. No grinding pain from half-healed burns or shredded feet. Just clean, precise motion that felt wrong in its completeness.
He flexed his fingers experimentally. They responded without hesitation. No stiffness. No scars.
The new body was perfect.
Almost like he'd never suffered at all.
The thought sat uncomfortably in his chest as he looked down at himself. Lean muscle where skeletal limbs had been. Whole skin where burns had carved through flesh. Even his hearing had returned - the oppressive silence of deafness replaced by the soft whisper of wind through distant stones.
Cel's gaze lifted from his hands to his surroundings.
The ravine hadn't changed.
Rough stone pressed against his back, cold and unyielding. The walls rose steep on either side, casting long shadows in the dim morning light. This was where he'd bled out beneath the full moon.
Where he'd died.
The memory felt distant now - muted by resurrection and the trial that had followed. But the evidence remained.
His eyes dropped to the ground where he'd fallen.
Blood had soaked into the ground there - his blood. It had dried to black crust, spreading across cracked earth in a pattern that looked almost deliberate. Like veins. Like roots.
Then a tremor pulsed from below.
Cel jerked backward, instinct screaming before his mind caught up.
The ground beneath his dried blood tore open with a sound like breaking bone. Not wide - just a thin wound in the stone. But through it, something dark began to seep.
Not quite mist. Not quite solid.
Something in between - pitch black tendrils that held their shape as they poured from the fissure. They moved with purpose, spreading across the ground like searching fingers. The air grew heavier as more escaped, carrying a stench that burned his nostrils. Decay. Corruption.
The crack widened.
Then came the sound.
Not a growl. Not a roar.
A breath.
Low and ragged, like something massive drawing air through a throat that had forgotten how. The ground shuddered with it - a rhythmic tremor that traveled up through Cel's legs and settled in his chest.
Something was waking up.
And Cel had no intention of finding out what.
His body responded instantly - legs pumping, arms driving for balance as he lifted.
The first step launched him forward with explosive force he didn't expect.
His foot slammed down twice as hard as intended. The ground cracked beneath him. Momentum carried him forward in a stumbling lunge that sent him careening toward the ravine wall.
Cel threw his arms out, catching himself against rough stone. His palm hit with enough force to scrape skin raw.
'Too strong—'
The mist surged suddenly, no longer content to creep. It boiled from the widening crack in thick waves, coalescing into shapes that weren't quite constant. Forming, dissolving, reforming - each one writhing with hungry intelligence.
No time to adjust. No time to learn.
Cel pushed off the wall and ran.
Each step was a controlled fall. His legs drove harder than they should, carrying him in lurching bounds that ate distance but threatened to send him sprawling with every stride.
Ash kicked up in clouds beneath his feet. Stones blurred past. He ricocheted off another wall, shoulder slamming into rock, using the impact to redirect himself down the twisting path.
Behind him, the tendrils screamed - sharp and furious, like metal tearing through metal. The noise bounced off the ravine walls, amplifying until it felt like it was coming from everywhere at once.
Cel didn't look back.
The path kept going. And going.
He'd fallen into this ravine from above - plummeted straight down into its depths after the amber-eyed creature had thrown him. But the exit wasn't where the fall had been. The ravine stretched on, twisting, diving deeper.
His vision tunneled to the path ahead. Nothing else mattered. Not the gifts he'd received. Not the resurrection that had brought him here. Just movement. Just distance between himself and whatever was clawing its way from the earth.
The tendrils hissed again - closer now.
A massive impact shook the ground behind him - not stone breaking, but something heavy slamming into the ravine floor.
Cel's lungs burned. His restored body didn't tire the way the old one would have, but the unfamiliar strength made every movement a gamble. He stumbled again, caught himself on momentum alone and kept running.
The path began to climb.
A slope. Shallow at first, then steeper. His legs drove him upward in powerful bounds that would have been impossible before. He grabbed at jutting stones, using them to pull himself higher, faster—
Then the ravine opened.
The exit appeared suddenly - a gap in the walls he hadn't seen coming, leading out into the gray-red light of dawn.
Cel threw himself through it.
His foot caught on the threshold. Wrong angle - he pitched forward, completely off balance, and fell.
He tumbled out of the ravine in a tangle of limbs, hitting the ashen ground hard. Ash exploded around him in thick clouds as he rolled down a shallow slope, finally slamming to a stop on flat earth.
He pushed himself up immediately, coughing, trying to suck in air through lungs that had forgotten how to work. Ash coated his mouth. He gagged, doubled over, and retched - nothing but gray dust and bile.
His eyes watered. The world blurred into streaks of red dawn and swirling gray. He couldn't see.
Panic slammed through him.
The entrance. Where was the entrance? Where were the tendrils?
Cel spun blindly, blinking hard, tears cutting tracks through the ash on his face. His chest heaved. Every breath pulled in more dust that made him want to gag again.
Then his vision cleared enough to make out shapes.
The ravine entrance. Perhaps twenty steps away.
And pouring from it - writhing, reaching, searching - came the tendrils.
They spilled out onto the open ground, spreading like oil across water. Black mist coiling forward with hungry intent, reaching for him—
They stopped.
Right at the edge where dawn's red light touched ground.
The black tendrils hissed like water on hot stone, recoiling from the illumination. They twisted back on themselves, writhing in what might have been pain. Within seconds, they'd begun retreating - pulling back into the shadow of the ravine, back toward whatever depths had spawned them.
The last tendril lingered at the threshold for a heartbeat longer before snapping back into darkness.
Silence crashed down.
Cel stood frozen, staring at the entrance. Waiting for movement. For the tendrils to surge forward anyway. For the hunt to continue.
Nothing happened.
The dawn light held them back.
His legs threatened to give out. He locked his knees, forcing himself to stay upright while his mind slowly caught up to what had just happened.
'If I'd stayed in my soul even a moment longer…' The thought turned his stomach.
He would have died - again.
Cel exhaled shakily, the sound loud in the sudden quiet.
His hands were still shaking. His breath still came too fast. But beneath the adrenaline and fear, something steadier settled into his chest.
Gratitude.
Selina had warned him. Urged him to leave when he might have lingered, studying the monolith, marveling at his gifts. She'd known that every second mattered.
She'd saved his life without even being here.
'Thank you,' he thought, not sure if she could hear him across whatever distance separated his soul from hers. But he meant it. Once more.
Cel took a steadying breath and dragged his gaze away from the ravine, forcing himself to assess his surroundings properly.
The wasteland stretched endlessly in every direction.
Cracked earth stretched in every direction, split by occasional fissures that ran like veins through stone. Ash lay thick and undisturbed across the ground - no wind to stir it, no life to disturb its perfect stillness. In the distance, obsidian stones jutted from the wasteland at irregular angles, their dark surfaces catching the dim red light of the sky.
The silence was absolute. Empty.
No hum vibrating through his bones. No crystalline song drilling into his skull. Just pure, suffocating quiet - the complete opposite of the maze that had nearly driven him mad.
Cel remained still, scanning for movement. For shapes that didn't belong. For any sign that something else shared this desolation with him.
Nothing stirred.
Only when he was certain did he begin walking.
Away from the ravine. Away from whatever slept beneath the cracked stone. His footsteps left shallow prints in the ash, a trail marking his passage through this dead land.
The sky remained unchanged - that same hollow crimson glow. No sun climbed toward zenith. No shadows to mark time's passage.
With each step, the reality of his situation settled over him.
He was trapped in one of the Hollow Realms' forsaken dimensions - a place where life had withered and died, leaving only twisted things to crawl through the ruins. The cult had thrown him here as a living key to seal a rift, and now that rift was closed. Gone.
His only way home was to find another rift. One that connected these ashlands back to his world.
An impossible task.
It wasn't without reason that even the most elite Chosen rarely returned alive from rift-sealing missions. Stepping through to close a breach was regarded as one of the highest noble deeds - and also as a sacrifice. Because death was almost certain.
Finding a rift in a dimension this vast was like searching for a needle in an endless field of hay. He could wander for weeks, months, and never stumble across one. Some dimensions had multiple rifts. Others had none at all.
In the end, it all came down to luck.
Cel's jaw tightened as he walked.
But dwelling on the odds wouldn't help. The first step was survival. Just like in the crystal maze - stay alive, keep moving, find a way forward.
The only difference now was that he could fight back.
He had a weapon. Powers granted by the goddess herself. He wasn't the helpless, broken prisoner stumbling through that nightmare anymore.
His fingers flexed at his side, anticipation cutting through the weight of his situation.
Cel walked until the ravine disappeared behind him, swallowed by the endless gray. Until he found a twisted pillar of blackened stone jutting from the ground like a broken fang.
He stopped there.
If anything in this place could be called safe, this was close enough.
He scanned the surroundings one more time, then turned his attention inward.
Now was the time to see what the goddess had given him. Not in description, but in truth.