The other side of the chasm offered no comfort. The land was more broken, more aggressive. Jagged spines of rock thrust from the soil like the bones of a half-buried leviathan. The air grew thinner, colder, carrying a sharp, metallic tang that stung the lungs. The grey sky seemed lower here, pressing down on the peaks.
I moved like a man already dead, each step a monumental effort. The ravenous hunger born from my use of the shadow-state had not abated; it had settled into a deep, grinding ache that consumed my every thought. My mind felt scoured, raw. The mental clarity I'd discovered in the fissure was a distant memory, replaced by a fog of exhaustion. The compass pull was a faint, nagging whisper, easily drowned out by the clamor of my own body's demands.
We found a shallow cave, little more than a gouge in the mountainside, as the light began to fail. I didn't bother with a fire. I simply collapsed against the back wall, my pack dropping beside me with a thud. I fumbled for the last of the waybread. The enchanted cake was a dry, tasteless lump in my mouth, but the faint warmth it provided was a fleeting balm. It wasn't enough. Nothing would be enough.
"The cost is… absolute," I rasped, my throat dry. My waterskin was nearly empty.
"The power you wield is a fundamental force," Croft said, his voice subdued. He had been unusually quiet since the bridge. "To invoke it for more than a moment is to ask your mortal shell to channel a divine current. It will burn through any fuel it can find."
"It feels like it's eating me from the inside out." I closed my eyes, but the darkness behind my lids was a swirling vortex of hunger and fatigue. My shadow-sight, usually so sharp, felt blurred, unreliable. The silver glow around Croft flickered at the edges of my perception.
Sleep, when it came, was not restful. It was a chaotic slide into fragmented visions. I saw the twilight field from my first memory, the grey flowers stretching to the horizon, but now they were withered, crumbling to dust at my touch. The shadowy horse was a skeletal thing, its hooves cracking the barren earth. I was riding, but I was not an angel of death; I was a scavenger, a hollow thing searching for a morsel of warmth in a cold land.
I woke with a start, my heart pounding. A deep, resonant thump echoed through the mountain, a sound felt more in the bones than heard with the ears. It was not the grinding of the abomination or the shriek of breaking stone. This was slower. Heavier. A rhythmic, tectonic pulse.
Thump.
The ground beneath me vibrated.
Thump.
Croft was alert on a rock near the cave entrance, his head cocked. "Something moves."
I pushed myself upright, my body protesting every movement. I peered out into the pre-dawn gloom. The sound was coming from further up the pass, around a bend shrouded in mist. The compass pull, which had been so faint, gave a sudden, sharp tug in that exact direction. It was no longer a whisper, but a resonant chord struck deep within my chest, harmonizing with the distant, pounding rhythm.
Thump.
It was a call. And it was a warning.
"It's there," I whispered, the realization cutting through my exhaustion like a shard of ice. "The next piece. But it's… guarded."
The nature of the pull was different this time. It wasn't just a fragment of a god calling to its kin. There was an intelligence behind this resonance, a will as vast and ancient as the mountains themselves. The thing that was pounding its rhythm through the stone was not a mindless horror like the abomination. It was a sentinel. And it knew we were here.
A new, colder fear settled over me, one that had nothing to do with the gnawing in my gut or the fatigue in my mind. The first trial had been a test of my power and its limits. This felt like a test of my worth.
I looked at the last crumb of waybread in my hand. I looked at my near-empty waterskin. I was a starving man being summoned to a feast where he was likely to be the main course.
"We are out of food, Croft," I said, my voice flat. "I have no strength for a fight. Not against that." I gestured weakly toward the source of the pounding.
Croft turned his dark eyes on me. "The choice has never been about strength, Cassian. It has been about purpose. The mountain does not care if you are hungry. The sentinel will not pity your fatigue. You are a shard of a god. Act like one."
The words were harsh, but they were the kindling I needed. The self-pity and exhaustion receded, burned away by a spark of grim resolve. I was Cassian. I was an angel of death. My body was a failing vessel, but my will was a shard of divinity.
I got to my feet, swaying slightly. I would not go to this confrontation cowering. I would go empty. I would go as what I truly was at my core: a thing of shadow and death. Perhaps that was what the mountain demanded.
I left the empty pack in the cave. I kept only my staff, the black ring on my finger, and the empty waterskin. I would either drink from a mountain stream soon, or I would have no further need for water.
Thump.
The sound was closer now. An invitation. A challenge.
I stepped out of the cave and into the cold dawn, a hollow man following the hungry pull of his own soul, walking toward the pounding heart of the mountain.