"NO!" The word was a strangled, horrified scream torn from Elara's throat. She surged to her feet, lunging toward the wall-screen as if she could physically tear her friends from their doomed path. "LUCAN, DON'T!"
The seamless white wall repelled her with an invisible, unyielding force, throwing her back onto the cold floor. She was a spectator, bound and helpless.
His name was Lucian, the voice in her head corrected her with chilling indifference, a casual erasure of the human boy he once was. And you are forgetting your place, student. You do not give orders. You observe. You learn.
On the screen, her friends stumbled into the maw of the right-hand cave. The darkness within was absolute, the air thick with the charnel stench of rot and ancient hunger. For a moment, there was silence. Mira, panting, leaned against a wall, her defiant choice seeming, for a dangerous second, to have been the right one. Selvara, fuming and terrified, began to scan the darkness, her instincts screaming that they had just sealed their own tomb.
Then, from the depths, a sound began. A wet, chittering click, multiplied by a dozen, then a hundred. And the walls began to move.
Red, multifaceted eyes opened in the darkness. What they had mistaken for rock formations were the carapaces of dormant Ash Crawlers, creatures of serrated claws and insatiable appetites, awakened by the scent of fresh, wounded prey. The cave was not a shelter. It was a digestive tract, and they had just willingly walked into its stomach.
The attack was not a charge. It was an avalanche of hunger. The Crawlers, emaciated and frenzied, poured from the walls and ceiling.
Selvara reacted first, shoving Mira behind her and slashing blindly with her knife, her logical mind finally snapping under the sheer, suicidal folly of their situation. "I told you!" she shrieked, a sound of pure, venomous rage and terror. "I told you this was a mistake!"
Mira, paralyzed, could only summon a pathetic flicker of green light, her system utterly useless against this tide of ravenous bodies.
It was Draven, semi-conscious and fueled by a last, desperate surge of adrenaline, who saved them from immediate death. He roared, not a challenge, but a pure, agonized bellow of a wounded animal. With his one good arm, he ripped a massive, crystalline rock formation from the cave floor and swung it like a club, crushing the first wave of Crawlers in a spray of acidic ichor. It was a magnificent, hopeless gesture. There were too many. For every one he smashed, three more scrambled over its corpse.
They swarmed him, their claws tearing at his flesh, his mangled arm, his legs. He bellowed in agony, still swinging, a doomed titan refusing to fall. Mira and Selvara were back to back, their knife and weak light a pathetic defense as the tide of chittering horrors closed in.
Elara couldn't watch. She turned away from the screen, pressing her face into the cold, uncaring floor of her prison, her body wracked with silent, choked sobs. She could hear the wet tearing sounds, the panicked screams, the final, gurgling roar of Draven's defiance, all through the perfect audio of her torture chamber.
She had chosen. And she had chosen wrong. She had tried to defy him, to play his game, and in doing so, had become the architect of her friends' slaughter. His lesson was brutal, absolute, and seared into her soul with the acid of their dying screams: Her choices did not matter. Their choices did not matter. All paths, all decisions, all hope, led to the exact same ruin.
Look, Lucian's voice commanded, cool and insistent.
An invisible force gripped her head, forcing her to turn, to watch. On the screen, the carnage was nearly complete. Draven was down, a barely recognizable mound of flesh being torn apart by a dozen Crawlers. Selvara and Mira were about to be overwhelmed.
A predictable outcome for an illogical choice, his voice stated, devoid of any pleasure or satisfaction. Now. The final component of the lesson.
He raised his hand. Through the screen, Elara saw the Ash Crawlers suddenly freeze, their ravenous hunger replaced by a confusion, then a palpable, primal fear. A shadow was falling over the cave entrance.
A hulking, weeping, monstrous shape was blocking the only exit. The Griever.
And behind it, descending from the canyon walls, came the two Silent Stalkers.
The Crawlers, mindless predators moments before, were now panicked prey. They began to scramble back, away from the new, more powerful horrors. But there was nowhere to run.
Lucian had not sent his hounds to kill the heroes. He had sent them to kill the witnesses to their failure.
The Griever lumbered into the cave, and a slaughter began. It did not differentiate between human and monster. Its massive, sorrowful fists pulped Crawler and what was left of Draven with the same indifferent, crushing force. The Silent Stalkers flowed through the chaos like black smoke, their claws slicing through the Crawler carapaces with effortless ease. The chittering screams of the monsters were added to the chorus of the damned.
Amidst the chaos, a single Stalker moved with purpose. It flowed past the carnage, directly to the two huddled, catatonic women, Selvara and Mira. It did not attack them. It simply stood over them, a silent, black sentinel.
On the screen, the last of the Ash Crawlers was exterminated. The Griever fell silent. The other Stalker came to rest. The cave was now a silent, blood-soaked abattoir, with two survivors, their minds shattered, protected from the carnage by one of the very things that had been hunting them.
And that, Lucian's voice echoed in the White Room, a final, chilling punctuation, is the lesson of ruin. Your friends made the wrong choice, and died. They made the 'right' choice, as you did, and would have ended up in the same trap, only with less suffering. The outcome is always the same. The only variable is the amount of pain one experiences in the process. True intelligence is not about finding the 'winning' path. It is about choosing the path of least resistance towards the inevitable.
He gestured. The Stalker in the cave reached down and, with an almost gentle touch, tapped both Mira and Selvara on the forehead. They collapsed, unconscious.
Their pathetic struggle is over, for now. I am wiping their memories of this... failure. They will awaken in the 'safe' cave, believing they made the correct choice, that Draven sacrificed himself heroically to save them from a rockfall. They will be granted a clean slate. A new, false hope. Because I wish it. Because their hope is a resource for future lessons.
The screen went white. He stepped closer to where Elara knelt, a broken, trembling wreck on the floor.
You, however, his voice was soft now, almost intimate, will be allowed to remember it all. This lesson was for you, after all. The architect of their doom. Meditate on it. Your next lesson will begin when you have fully integrated the meaning of futility.