They walked for three days… or three hours… or three centuries.
Time had rotted here the way meat rots in salt—slowly, thoroughly, and with a stench that clung to the bones.
(SFX: drip… drip… distant water echoing like a dying pulse)
Behind them, the City-That-Ate-Time sank into the black flood, swallowed inch by inch until only the inverted ziggurat remained—an obsidian island crowned with corpse-green torches. The branded faces carved into its terraces stared after them with hollow devotion.
Sunny looked back only once.
(SFX: shadow ripple as the mist twisted shut behind them)
Ash never did.
The Drowned Shore
The mist thickened—heavy, wet, and metallic, like wool soaked in blood.
Forward was the only direction left.
Drowned towers leaned like drunk conspirators, their reflections wavering in the black glass of the water. Bridges of stone and bone arched high above, dripping strands of rot that vanished before touching the surface.
In those reflections, Sunny saw ghosts.
Not illusions—loops, memories trapped like flies in amber.
Nephis, silver hair plastered to her face, carrying a dying slave on her back while her own legs bled rivers.
Effie, laughing through cracked teeth as she strangled a centipede monstrosity the size of a bus.
Kai, wings of starlight trembling, catching the last real sunset the Shore ever saw.
Cassie, whispering prophecies into a future that had already eaten her alive.
Translucent. Repeating. Silent.
Ash walked blind to all of it, spear balanced across her shoulders like a yoke. The faint fire simmering beneath her skin guttered low, burning cold instead of hot. Ahead, the Crimson Spire pulsed once every few hours.
(SFX: boom… a single heartbeat of distant red light)
"You see them too," Ash said. Not a question.
Sunny didn't answer. He watched Nephis collapse and rise again in an endless, merciless loop.
Ash snorted. A thin, humorless sound.
"My mother said the Shore keeps its ghosts busy so they don't haunt the living."
"Your mother was optimistic."
They kept walking.
The Caravan Appears
On the third evening—if "evening" still meant anything—the mist peeled apart.
(SFX: shhhhh… fog retreating like a drawn breath)
The caravan waited exactly where it had always waited.
Eight wagons.
A crooked circle.
Iron cages bolted to their beds.
Rusted half-plate on guards whose helms had fused to bone.
It was all the same.
Only worse.
The wagons had sunk axle-deep into the dead stone but still turned—slow, eternal, frictionless. Wood petrified to stone. Iron bleeding rust like old wounds. Chains clinking though the air was perfectly still.
The guards no longer walked.
They had become part of the wagons—arms fused to wood, legs rooted into iron. Their helms had cracked open like rotting flowers, revealing not faces but pits of darkness threaded with rows of wet, grinding teeth.
And at the center…
A mountain of corpses.
A crude giant thirty meters tall, woven from thousands of chained bodies—arms, legs, torsos braided together into a blasphemous humanoid shape.
Every face screamed.
Every mouth moved.
None made sound.
A crown of broken slave collars sat crookedly on its skull.
Its eyes were wagon wheels, still turning.
Ash stopped dead. The flame beneath her skin dimmed to embers.
"They call it the Master of All Roads," she murmured. "It's been walking the same circle since the worlds merged. Every slave who dies on the Shore ends up… added."
Sunny felt old weight settle in his gut. The same weight he'd carried the very first time he woke in one of these cages.
The caravan noticed them.
(SFX: CRRRRK as a thousand heads twist in unison)
Every guard turned.
Every caged slave pressed against their bars.
Every hollow helm stared.
One guard raised its rusted spear and pointed directly at Sunny.
The mountain spoke—through every mouth at once.
"Passenger… zero zero zero one… you are… late."
The gates of the caravan groaned open.
(SFX: GRRRROOOAN of ancient metal waking)
An invitation.
Ash stepped instinctively back.
Sunny stepped forward.
The water around his boots hardened into chains.
(SFX: CLINK-CLINK-CLINK )
They wrapped his ankles and pulled.
He didn't resist.
The gates slammed shut behind him with coffin-lid finality.
(SFX: THUD. DEAD SILENCE.)
Inside the Circle
Air thickened to syrup. The smell of rot pressed against lungs and memory.
The corpse-mountain leaned low, wagon-wheel eyes spinning faster.
"Welcome back… Slave," it whispered.
Almost tender.
The nearest cage swung open.
Sunny stepped inside.
(SFX: click —the lock he had never forgotten)
He was home.
Six meters by four.
Bars too close to stretch.
Floor slick with filth.
Twenty ghosts huddled in corners wearing the faces of people he used to know.
Most didn't recognize him.
Some did.
The caravan began moving.
(SFX: creak… creak… wheels grinding through centuries)
(SFX: rattle-rattle chains singing a dead lullaby)
Sunny stood in the center of the cage.
Then he saw him.
A boy.
Fifteen.
Starved.
Black hair matted.
Silver eyes wide with terrified hope.
Brand 0001 burned fresh on his forehead.
The boy stared at him as if staring at a ghost.
Sunny stared back.
The boy's lips parted.
"…You promised you'd come back."
Something old and calcified cracked inside Sunny's chest.
He crossed the cage in two steps and knelt.
The boy flinched.
Up close—every detail he had spent a lifetime burying surfaced. The bruises. The split lip. Knees scraped raw from crawling. The hopelessness carved into too-young eyes.
Sunny raised a hand and gently touched the brand.
Hot.
Too real.
The boy trembled.
"I did," Sunny whispered. His voice ancient, worn. "I'm here now."
Tears spilled.
"You left me," the boy choked. "You left all of us."
Behind them, the corpse-mountain laughed.
(SFX: a thousand wet throats gurgling in perfect sync)
Outside, Ash slammed her spear against an invisible barrier as flames roared uselessly.
Inside, Sunny held the shaking hand of the child he once was.
The wheels turned.
The chains sang.
And the Forgotten Shore bared all its rusted teeth—
Because it had finally caught the one slave who ever escaped.