Flight in the Abyssal Pits was not an option. It was a desperate, ground-level scramble through a nightmare's plumbing. The chittering of the Kith'rik swarm was a living wall of sound at their backs, growing closer with every pounding heartbeat. Valerius moved with preternatural grace, a shadow flowing over jagged rocks and through narrow fissures. Kaelen followed, his newfound physical stability from the Geode's pact the only thing keeping him upright. His breaths sawed in his lungs, but his legs, though burning, did not buckle.
"They are herders, not hunters!" Valerius called back, his voice cutting through the din. "They will not simply kill you. They will corner you, pin you, and begin the carving. Their pacts are not bargains—they are brandings, turning you into a psychic beacon for their hive-mind. You will lose your will before you lose your life!"
The tunnel they fled down opened suddenly into a vast, surreal space. The oppressive stone gave way to a forest. But this was no surface woodland. The "trees" were gigantic, bioluminescent fungi—massive caps in hues of ghostly blue, toxic green, and bruised purple, shedding a dim, pulsating light. Thick, spongy moss carpeted the ground, and giant, pale mushrooms served as stepping stones across pools of stagnant, mirror-dark water. The air was thick with the smell of decay and sweet, cloying spores.
"The Gloomweald," Valerius spat, slowing only slightly. "Do not inhale the spore-falls from the crimson caps. They bring waking nightmares. Do not touch the weeping amber sap. It is addictive and dissolves thought."
Kaelen nodded, swerving to avoid a gentle rain of glowing pink dust from a towering toadstool. The swarm behind them did not slow, pouring into the fungal forest like a black, chitinous river. The Kith'rik were each the size of a large dog, with six barbed legs, elongated heads full of rotating mouthparts, and iridescent shells that reflected the fungal glow in nauseating patterns.
Valerius vaulted over a giant, fallen log covered in phosphorescent lichen. "There is a guardian here! An old one! We must reach its clearing!"
They burst into a circular clearing where the fungal trees formed a perfect, silent circle. In the center stood a being that defied easy classification. It appeared as a woman sculpted from petrified, grey-white wood, her form elegant and tall, with hair of cascading, silvery moss. But from her back grew not wings, but massive, sweeping branches, barren of leaves, that scraped the cavern ceiling. Her eyes were knots of absolute darkness. At her feet lay bones—some animal, some disturbingly humanoid.
"The Weald-Warden," Valerius breathed, skidding to a halt and making a sharp, complex gesture with his hand—a sign of non-aggression in some forgotten tongue.
The wooden woman's head turned slowly, the sound of grinding roots. Her dark eye-knots fixed on the pursuing swarm, then on the two intruders.
"You bring tumult to my silence, blood-drinker," her voice echoed, not from a mouth, but from the very creaking of her form and the rustle of her moss-hair. It was the sound of a deep forest groaning in a storm.
"We seek sanctuary, Great Warden," Valerius said, his tone uncharacteristically respectful. "We offer no harm to your demesne. Only passage from the swarm."
The Kith'rik reached the edge of the clearing but stopped, their chittering taking on a hesitant, wary note. They knew this entity.
The Weald-Warden's branch-arms flexed. "Sanctuary is not given. It is traded. The vermin disturb my roots. Silence them. Permanently. Do this, and you may pass. Fail, and you will join the fertilizer at my feet."
It was not a request. It was a verdict.
Valerius looked at Kaelen, a grim smile on his lips. "Your foundation is laid, Aethelborn. Now let us see if it can support a fight." In a blur of motion, he was amidst the front rank of Kith'rik, not with a warrior's roar, but with a dancer's lethality. His hands were claws, moving faster than sight, severing limbs and piercing carapaces with surgical precision. He fought in utter silence.
Kaelen had no such grace. Two Kith'rik broke from the pack, skittering towards him on opposite sides. He felt the Aethel stir, responding to the immediate threat. This time, he didn't let rage alone guide it. He focused on the solidity the Geode had given him, the Unmoving Foundation. He envisioned it as an anchor within him.
He sidestepped a lunge from the first, its mandibles snapping shut on empty air. As the second leaped for his back, he didn't try to dodge fully. Instead, he dropped his weight, bracing. The creature slammed into him, its claws scrabbling against his scaled back. The impact drove the air from his lungs, but his stance held. He didn't fall.
Endure.
He reached back, his hand finding a chitinous limb. With a grunt fueled by the Geode's granted strength, he pulled, leveraging the creature's own momentum to flip it over his shoulder and slam it onto the spongy ground before him. Before it could right itself, he brought his foot down on its central eye cluster with a sickening crunch.
The first Kith'rik attacked again. Kaelen met it head-on. He didn't summon talons. He simply formed a fist, willed the Aethel to reinforce it with the concept of density, of unbreaking stone, and punched straight into its snapping maw. Chitin cracked. Ichor, smelling of ammonia and rust, sprayed. The creature went limp.
He fought mechanically, efficiently. He was not a blizzard of claws like Valerius. He was a landslide. Slow, deliberate, crushing. He used the environment—dodging behind thick fungal stalks, luring pursuers into patches of sticky, violet mold that slowed them. He took a shallow cut on his arm from a barbed leg, but the wound felt distant, a minor flaw in a stone column.
Within minutes, it was over. A dozen Kith'rik lay dead or twitching in the clearing. The rest of the swarm, their psychic hive-mind sensing significant losses for no gain, retreated back into the tunnels, their chittering fading.
Valerius stood amidst his own circle of carnage, unblemished. He gave Kaelen an appraising nod. "Functional. Brutish, but functional. You are learning to use your gifts, not be used by them."
The Weald-Warden gave a slow, creaking nod of satisfaction. "The silence returns. You may pass." One of her root-like feet shifted, and the mossy ground behind her parted to reveal a hidden, downward-sloping path veiled by curtains of glowing lichen. "The path leads to the Sulfur Falls and the deeper vaults. Mind the vapors."
As they moved towards the path, Kaelen felt a familiar, cold pull—not from the silver thread, but from the edge of the clearing. Among the bones at the Warden's feet, something glinted dully. It was a circlet, twisted and blackened, made of a metal that seemed to drink the fungal light. One of its points was broken off. It hummed with a faint, mournful resonance that called to the Aethel in his core.
He hesitated.
"Leave it," Valerius said sharply, noticing his gaze. "Grave goods are cursed by default here. That is a Hollow Crown. It belongs to a failed king, his ambition and memory leached into the Weald. Touch it, and you invite his regrets to become your tenants."
But the pull was insistent. It wasn't offering power. It was weeping. A soundless lament that vibrated in his marrow. Before Valerius could stop him, Kaelen bent and picked it up.
Cold, so deep it burned, shot up his arm. The clearing vanished.
He stood in a grand hall of living crystal, now cracked and dark. Outside, a sky of roiling, beautiful chaos—a realm of shifting colors and singing storms. A throne of lightning awaited him. He was not Kaelen. He was King Zyr, last lord of the Aether-Elves, a people who rode cosmic winds. His heart swelled with love for his chaotic, free domain. Then, the golden light came. The God-King Solaris's Legions of Order. The offer: submit, standardize, worship the single sun. He refused. The war was not a war; it was an erasure. His people, attuned to chaos, were surgically undone by rigid divine law. In the final hour, as his crystal palace crumbled, he forged this crown, pouring his people's last song, their last breath of wild freedom, into it. Then he threw himself and his kingdom into the void, rather than see it caged. They fell, and fell, and landed here, in the dark. The crown, his final anchor, rolled to the feet of a growing tree…
The vision shattered. Kaelen staggered, the Hollow Crown clutched in his hand. It was no longer cold. It was warm with a fading, tragic heat. He felt the ghost of cosmic winds in his hair, the taste of a lost, chaotic sky on his tongue. And beneath it, a hatred for Solaris so pure and ancient it made his own vengeance seem like a newborn's rage.
"Fool," Valerius hissed, but there was a flicker of fascination in his eyes. "What did you see?"
"A king who chose the abyss over a cage," Kaelen whispered, his voice rough with borrowed grief. He looked at the crown. It was not a tool. It was a tombstone. And a testament.
"It is a memory-echo. Powerful, but passive," Valerius said. "It cannot grant a pact. Only a perspective. And now its pain is yours to carry, too."
Kaelen slipped the broken circlet into the rough belt of his tunic. It was a weight, but a meaningful one. A reminder that his was not the first kingdom Solaris had destroyed. He would not be the last ghost in the dark, unless he won.
They took the hidden path. It wound down through increasingly geothermal areas, the air growing acrid with sulfur. The distant roar of water grew louder. As they walked, the silver thread in Kaelen's chest gave another, subtler pulse. This time, no violent image came. Instead, a single, clear, desperate thought, not his own, arrowed into his mind:
Find the anchor. Stop the bleed.
It was Lyra's voice, but stripped of its celestial certainty, filled with a panic she would never show her brothers. The thought was followed by a fleeting, technical impression—a diagram of a soul, with a silvery line fraying at one end, causing a cascade of destabilizing energy.
She wasn't just suffering the bond; she was analyzing it. And she was communicating, across the impossible gulf, not to threaten, but to… instruct? To save herself?
Before he could process this, they emerged at the Sulfur Falls. It was a breathtaking, hellish vista. A river of milky, yellow-tinged water cascaded from a cavern roof hundreds of feet above into a boiling, steaming lake below. The walls were coated in brilliant yellow sulfur crystals and blood-red mineral deposits. The heat was oppressive.
And there, on a natural stone bridge that arced over the roaring falls, stood a new figure.
She was tall and willowy, her skin the deep green of forest shadows, her hair a cascade of living vines dotted with tiny, glowing white flowers. She wore garments of woven bark and spider-silk. Her beauty was ethereal and predatory. At her side, embedded in the bridge stone, was a staff of petrified wood topped with a captured, swirling wisp of pale green light. She watched their approach with eyes the color of sun-dappled leaves, holding a goblet carved from a single ruby. She drank from it deeply, and Kaelen saw the liquid within was dark and viscous.
A Dryad. But not like any from surface tales. This one was steeped in the abyss.
"Valerius," she said, her voice a melody played on rustling leaves. "You travel with curious company. A Draconian smelling of fresh pacts and old crowns." Her gaze settled on Kaelen, and she smiled, revealing delicately pointed teeth stained faintly red. "I am Nyrissa. I watch the crossroads. And I have been waiting for you."
Valerius stepped forward, his posture wary. "Nyrissa. Your price for passage is always too high."
"My price is merely… sustaining," she said, licking a drop of dark liquid from her lip. "The Falls' vapors are lethal to mortal flesh. My blessing allows safe passage. I require only a taste. A sip of something… potent." Her eyes locked on Kaelen's chest, as if she could see the Aethel swirling there. "Not your life. Just a drink from the well of your newfound strength. A taste of the Geode's solidity, perhaps mixed with the thrilling rage just beneath."
She was a vampiric spirit, but not of blood. Of essence.
Kaelen felt the Hollow Crown heavy against his hip, a king's defiance. He felt the solidity in his bones. He felt Lyra's desperate, alien thought echoing in his skull. He was a crossroads himself.
He looked at the beautiful, deadly dryad, then at the treacherous bridge over the roaring, poisonous falls. Another deal. Another step down.
"How much of a taste?" Kaelen asked, his voice echoing the steady rhythm the Geode had solidified within him.
Nyrissa's smile widened. "Just enough to remember the flavor by."