Riven liked crowds. They were loud, messy, and easy to hide behind. What he didn't like was being shoved into a place where the dark had teeth.
The Shadow Pit smelled like old coal and wet leather. Torches were sunk into iron rings around the rim, their flames small as if afraid to look down. Below, the pit dropped away into a black mouth where no light lived. Thin bridges of rope and rotten wood stitched the gap, but every step on them creaked traitorous.
Riven flexed his fingers until the knuckles cracked. "Lovely," he muttered at the smoke. "Ladder to hell. My kind of tourist trap."
He'd promised tokens, or at least promised to come back with something useful. That promise tasted like stale bread now. The camp's faces hovered at the seam — some pity, some worry, a few calculating looks. Lyra had waved them off with that slow smile. Kael had given him a hard nod and that ribbon from Seren felt tight in his pocket. It was small. It felt like a promise and like a chain all at once.
"Go on, then," the pit-keeper said without looking up. He was a thin man with a face like folded paper, ledger strapped to his hip. His voice had the flatness of someone who'd been asked the same question too many times. "Pay the toll. Walk the bridges. Don't fall. If you make it across, there's coin. If you don't, well—" He shrugged. Ledger ink marked his throat like a collar.
Riven spat into the dirt more for show than any real bravado. He tossed the last token on the iron plate by the entrance. The token vanished in a small hiss of dust. The keeper wrote something in his book with careful strokes.
The system flashed in his head like cold water:
[Room Detected: The Shadow Pit] Rule: Walk alone. Face what clings. Condition: Step soft. Fail = Shadow takes step.
"Alone," Riven said, tasting the word. It sounded like the worst kind of dare. He adjusted his pack and slung his sword across his back. He'd fight shadows before. He'd cut things that smelled wrong. This was different. This wanted him to remember what he'd been hiding.
The first bridge was a joke — slack rope and planks that had seen better winters. The wood groaned, but it held. Halfway across, the air grew colder. Riven slowed his breath like someone counting heartbeats. Beneath him the dark looked like water gone hungry.
He reached the center and stopped. From the black something moved — a ripple like someone walking under a sheet. The hair rose on his arms. Riven wanted to laugh at himself for being jumpy. He forced his voice loud and steady anyway. "All right, come out then. Show me your best scary face."
A quiet sound answered — not a voice, but a hollow scrape, like claws on bone. The shadow slid up the side of the pit like smoke finding a crack. It took shape: not full flesh, but the idea of a man. It had his height, maybe; it had a grin that was his grin but wrong, teeth too many, eyes like coins turned black.
"You think you can step through me?" it said in a voice that sounded like his own worn on the edge. "You think you can be loud and swallow fear?"
Riven's jaw tightened. The shadow was trying to bait him. "Pfft. Been there. Done that. Buy the shirt." He lifted his sword not because he trusted metal would cut this, but because motion felt like proof he wasn't a coward.
The thing lunged. Not physical. It brushed him like a cold memory. Riven felt something inside loosen — a laugh that used to mean something warm died small in his throat. The shadow moved in time with his jokes, with his bravado, looking for the hollow places.
Riven's hands shook. He'd always hidden things with words; jokes were his armor. Now the thing reached into the cracks his jokes left. It found a narrow alley where he had slipped as a child, the way light used to taste after rain. For a second, the alley's memory lifted his chest like someone putting a hand on his back. Then the shadow pulled it out and showed it to him as if it were nothing.
Riven stumbled. The bridge snapped a groan. For a beat he thought he'd fall.
He shouldn't have let it touch that. He'd give away pieces of himself for a laugh and now the laugh had cost him light.
He gritted his teeth and did the stupidest thing he could think of. He laughed. Not the bright loud laugh he used in taverns, but a low bark, sharp and real. He remembered a stupid little thing — a goat that had stepped on his foot and then licked his face in a market. He saw it for a flash, bright and small. He squeezed the memory and threw it at the shadow like a torch.
The shadow hesitated. It recoiled from the goat as if disgusted. For a sliver of a breath the pit seemed to remember there were things that stank worse than fear.
Riven pressed on. Bridge by bridge, he used scraps of oddness. A memory of a girl who'd thrown him a hard apple and called him a son of a dog. A smell of coal warmed with laughter. He kept giving small things — not the deep parts the altar wanted, but little, exact pins of himself that didn't feed the Ledger much but kept his light on.
The shadow learned. It tried to mimic the goat memory and failed, turning it sour. Every time the shadow tried to make his small kindness mean something ugly, Riven pushed back with another stupid, useless scrap of life. He realized, slow and angry and bright, that he could choose what the shadow kept.
Halfway through the Pit a shape moved from the darkness: a thin woman shrouded in patched black, eyes like pickled olives. She stood at the edge of a broken plank and watched him with a smile that might have been pity.
"You give it small things," she said without surprise. "Most give deep. They pay more because they're trying to buy forgetfulness."
Riven spat. "And who are you? Another collector?"
She shrugged. "I mend. I take scraps and stitch them back into use. Name's Vess. If you want, I could show you a trick." She tapped her own chest. "Keep a mark on the lip of the world. Small things cheap. Deep things expensive."
Riven should have said no. He should have kept moving, bridged, banked the little victories for his pride. Instead, he stopped, breathed, and asked the simplest thing that made him feel like a real man — "How do you do it?"
Vess smiled, crooked. "You keep what means nothing to the Ledger. You make the memory worthless to ink by making it messy. A goat is useless; a name is useful. You want to live? Learn worthless things."
She taught him a small knot she tied at his wrist with a thread taken from her sleeve. "When the shadow reaches for the bright stuff, squeeze the knot. Think of the goat. Think of the sound of a fool's sneaker on a wet stone. It hurts for a moment. Then it passes." She didn't say how long it would last. She didn't promise the Ledger wouldn't come for him later.
He practiced until his hand cramped. He kept crossing planks, each step a little less greedy and a little more steady. At the far side of the Pit the keeper nodded and the ledger man scratched a line.
Riven stepped out. He felt hollower in places, yes. A small memory had been used like coin — the one where his mother had called him brave because he'd jumped a creek. But he came back with something else: a knot on his wrist, a trick he could use to keep the shadow from picking out his biggest pieces, and a small, honest laugh in his throat that didn't taste like fear.
He had not won. He had not earned glory. He'd scraped for himself.
The pit-keeper looked at him as he left and said, ledger-smooth, "You paid, and you kept enough. That's rare."
Riven spat on the stone and grinned, tired and feral. "Hmph. Rare is my brand."
He walked away toward the seam where the others had said they'd meet. The ribbon in his pocket ticked cool against his side. He touched the knot on his wrist like it was a promise.
Behind him, faint and patient, a bell hit the world.
BOOOONG.