The descent was no longer a question of distance, but of chronological survival.
Tartarus was no longer content to be deep; it had become a kaleidoscope of shattered realities. With every meter gained downward, the air changed consistency. Jormund saw Siegfried, at his side, undergoing horrific metamorphoses: in the blink of an eye, the warrior reverted to the young Prince with smooth hands, only to become, in the next moment, a skeleton in armor whose bones were falling to dust.
"Don't look at the walls!" Jormund roared.
His own voice came back to him with a ten-second delay, overlapping his current words in an unbearable din. Jormund was suffering. His obsidian structure, so stable until now, was beginning to crack, not under pressure, but under the wear and tear of millennia compressed into a few moments. Veins of basalt crumbled on his chest, revealing the fiery red of his telluric will struggling to maintain its cohesion.
Time was no longer a river, it was an ocean in the midst of a storm.
Suddenly, gravity reversed. They were no longer falling, they were being thrown against what had once been the ceiling. Then everything slowed down. So slow that Jormund could see every speck of bone dust floating like motionless stars.
"Jormund... my... life... is... slipping... away..." articulated Siegfried, whose face was changing so quickly that it no longer had human features.
The Anomaly didn't think. He called upon his most basic power: Inertia.
He didn't try to fight time, he ordered matter to become "deaf." He enveloped himself and Siegfried in a shell of black rock so dense that even time waves could no longer pass through it. They became a meteor of silence, an anomaly of stasis colliding with chaos.
They crossed one last barrier, a membrane of golden light that seemed to be the very skin of the world.
THE IMPACT.
The silence that followed was more violent than any explosion.
Jormund opened his stone eyes. His protective shell shattered. He was there. They were there.
The bottom of the pit was not a cave. It was a room of impossible geometry, where the floor was made of a black, liquid mirror that reflected not the sky, but the stars of a vanished universe. At the center of this void, where all the lines of force of Tartarus converged, floated a sphere of light of unbearable purity.
It was not an object. It was a remnant. What remained of Chronos, the devoured King, beating like a dying heart in the middle of a field of eternal debris.
Siegfried stood up, his body stabilized but trembling. He looked around and saw, floating in the corners of the room, fragments of buildings that belonged to no known era. Glass columns, giant bronze gears, and in the distance, an archway that seemed to lead to a clinically white palace.
"The bottom of the world..." Siegfried whispered. Jormund, look... This isn't just a prison. It's a dump. The gods threw everything that didn't fit into their calculations here.
Jormund stepped toward the sphere. With each step, the mirror beneath him made a bell-like sound.
"This isn't a dump, Siegfried. It's the source. And I'm going to drink it."