Heir of the Fog

CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

Where One Falls, Three Rise

A breath of nothing, then his voice touched my ear like a cold feather, "Rogara." One word, no more, as though the Great Omen sto­od beside me in the dark. Instantly my pulse leapt, half pride, knowing he watched me still, half shame that I required his warning at all. This was only a lower tunnel, scarcely worthy of his gaze.

Find the threat. I slowed, letting silence settle. The tunnel shimmered only where mana-crystals winked blue-green, too small for harvest sacks and too dim for comfort. Ahead, darkness swallowed the passage; above, the ceiling disappeared into black.

That's where they hide. I slipped three carved darts from my belt. Muscle memory carried the first into a tight underhand throw; two more followed, arcing up, their bone tips whistling. Each one struck rock with a crack that rattled dust onto my shoulders.

No screech answered. Only the echoes, collapsing back into hush. I exhaled—too soon.

The floor shattered. Pack-cold stone parted like rotten cloth and something thick and wet slammed my left thigh. Pain detonated—teeth, serrated and backward-curving, grinding against bone. A worm. Not the thin dirt-eaters I had seen from a distance, but a full-grown sand burrower as long as I was tall and easily my weight.

Before the scream cleared my throat a second maw erupted beside me, swallowing my right arm to the elbow. The creature's jaw plates ratcheted inward, each click a promise to tear. Blood splashed onto the limestone, darker even to my adjusted eyes.

They were under me, not above. Stupid, stupid. Training axes and sparring cries flickered across memory, lessons about reading the ground, not the air.

More fissures opened. A third worm lunged, teeth scraping the bone guard of my axe as I twisted. Its body slammed over my hips, pinning me; the first two writhed, anchoring themselves with the barb-hooks of their tails.

My arm burned, but terror burned hotter. I let mana flare down the ruined limb, felt it coil through tendons the worm was trying to pulp, and swung. The beast clamped to my forearm weighed nearly as much as I did, yet the blow snapped its spine against the cavern wall as if it were dried reed. Chitinous rings popped; pale flesh sagged; the worm thudded onto half-lit gravel and twitched once, twice, then lay still.

I stared, panting, shocked by the crater the impact had gouged. That strength was foreign, a thing that still fit my bones awkwardly. The Great One's gift, I told myself, heart beating too fast. Another proof of his favor.

Sharn's warning echoed—her voice rasping across my memory: "You carry a mighty Khoris. Hold nothing back. If a sparring partner breaks, that only means the abyss never wanted them." I had nodded, yet within a day I broke Agnash's arm like a twig. I still remember the sound, wet splintering, his yell cut short out of pride and the way guilt chased the triumph from my stomach.

He was not the first I injured; half the Saruk bore new scars shaped by my "accidents." Each dawn I planned to restrain myself; each dawn I woke reborn, muscles denser, reflexes sharper, a stranger in my own skin.

I thanked Omen nightly but never felt worthy. Now, facing beasts instead of kin, I needn't restrain anything. The realization thrummed behind my ribs, dangerous and bright.

The worm on my thigh ground its teeth, trying to twist free of the rock pinning it. "You," I growled, voice ragged from pain. Mana surged again, less this time, but focused, and I yanked the creature up by the jaw. I slammed it down once, twice; vertebrae cracked like stepping on brittle crystal. A warm spray slapped my cheek; the worm went limp, wedged into a fissure that had spit it out.

Shock trembled in my limbs. Blood sheeted from arm and leg; bone winked through shredded muscle. Pain I could manage; pain had been my shadow since birth, but the damage was severe and growing worse. Another worm coiled nearby, uncertain now, tongue-spines tasting the air. I lifted my axe, made ready to lunge—then a gustless wind seemed to blow through me.

Red flow slowed, then stopped. Meat rippled across bone, knitting with dizzying speed. I watched the gape in my forearm shrink to a seam, then a welt, then smooth skin. The same on my thigh. Wonder chilled my marrow. At the same instant I felt my core empty, mana evacuating like water through a split waterskin. Hollow. And in that hollowness I sensed the new strand the Great One had woven into me.

Another blessing I never knew I carried. I inhaled, whispered thanks, though breath scraped dust. The hollowness lasted only heartbeats: the bond tugged, and cool power poured back in, filling my core almost to spilling. The Great One's unseen hand extended to me yet again. It had been some time since I last emptied my core, yet the sensation was the same as before.

The remaining worms sensed the shift, hunger turning to fear, and dove for their tunnels. I refused them. In two strides I cleaved the leader, then crushed the smaller pair against opposite walls. Stone rang; ichor spread. The fight, from first bite to final death, spanned less than a minute, yet my pulse still drummed inside my skull.

I stood alone amid ruined husks, expecting… something. Heat, or a surge, or the distant trumpet Agnash once claimed he heard in stories, signs of ascent. None came. Breath steadying, I accepted the truth: victory here was not enough. The trial, and Kharvad beyond it, still weighed my soul and found it too light.

I cleaned the axe on a fallen carapace, checked the new pink ridges sealing my arm and leg, and whispered into the dark, "I will not fail you, Omen." Only the drip of worm blood answered, but I felt, somewhere far above, the Great One's silent acknowledgment.

***

My warlock would soon burst past ebony, cracking into onyx in a single violent breath—I could feel the pressure building in our bond. Rogara, through that tether to me, now wielded strength that should have belonged to a seasoned onyx, not an ebony on Kharvad.

Her capabilities made me keenly aware of what warlocks were truly capable of. They might be servants, but they touched power beyond what should be allowed, and I could not fathom what a Baruk warlock bound to a true God would be like.

But then I remembered, more than once, while lost in the deep abyss, I had been defeated by crimson beasts whose abilities far exceeded my own. Their mana reserves felt endless, sustaining auras of death I could not overcome. At the time, I had assumed aberrant mutations. Now, I recognized the fingerprints of patronage.

For the moment, the caves, twisting skeins that ribbon the inner wall of the Abyss, offered me corridors rather than monsters. Yet I moved with the certainty that each turn of rock was watched. I knew that soon Sjakthar would send a warlock of his own to drag me back down below, and I would need a way out before that door closed.

The narrow tunnels offered me protection, a way up unchallenged, but I soon realized Sjakthar would not allow me to leave so easily. This was his territory after all, and soon the path itself presented challenges I could not fathom.

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Despite my careful and slow ascent, mapping every corner, learning the layout of the upper caves, soon my notations, my maps, began to digress, no longer matching the true structure of the tunnels. A path I had charted yesterday now bent like soft wax; the carving I had left on the rock appeared three levels below where it should have been; finger-wide crawlways opened where I was certain solid basalt had stood. Eventually, I realized that every 'shortcut' nudged me downward again, toward the arena I had already escaped.

At last I halted before a familiar wall, familiar because it bore my own carved sigil. Except that sigil belonged thirty or forty strata above. I pressed a hand to the groove; stone shimmered, blurred, and the mark vanished into bare rock. My map of intersecting paths fluttered uselessly in my other hand.

"You cannot imprison me," I said to the air, voice low but carrying. I doubted Sjakthar needed ears to hear within his domain, yet the words felt like pitting will against granite. A God powerful enough to dominate the Abyss could snuff me with a thought, but he did not.

He wanted me alive, bleeding in the Pit, climbing and killing until something in me burst. My core already pulsed at peak crimson; the next rule, whatever divides crimson from the nameless tier above, remained invisible to me, just as the first rule eluded my warlock as well. However, instinct insisted that if I breached that wall here, beneath Sjakthar's gaze, the consequences might chain me forever to his design.

I believed my theory about the true purpose of this place was correct, the same one I dared not voice, afraid he might hear it. The truth of this place, after all, was something Sjakthar clearly didn't want any of his people to know.

Accepting I would make no further headway through deceptive caves, I stepped to the lip of the nearest wall-mouth, a ragged tunnel no wider than my shoulders, and faced the true abyss. Windless grey rose above, fell below, and swallowed the opposite circumference of the abyss, leaving me no horizon, only distance implied by fog. Somewhere up there waited the escape; somewhere far beneath boiled the killing grounds of crimson titans. I judged I had already climbed several kilometres, but how many more, the fog refused to tell.

Fair enough, I thought. I pressed a palm to the chill surface, coaxed a fan of ice outward, and set my feet upon it. More frost answered every breath, forming shallow wedges for my toes, blade-thin collars my fingers could pinch. The wall itself warped minutely, angles flexing when I tried to gouge deeper, yet a crimson's weight is light compared to his will. A ridge half the width of a nail served well enough.

Exposed, I became moving bait. Any flyer that dared the open void could stoop at me unopposed; a single misstep would send me plunging into fog. Climb carefully, fight instantly—there was no middle rhythm.

Not ten body-lengths into the ascent a screech split the murk. A cluster of hook-limbed lizards swooped from a cave three levels above, spitting shards of chitin the size of spears. I snapped an arm up; a slab of ice flowered in their path, ringing like a gong when the first volley struck. Fragments ricocheted into the dark. The lizards wheeled for another pass, but I was already higher, footholds reforming as fast as old ones sheared away.

The attacks multiplied. Some beasts flung barbed tongues; others launched stones with the snap of elastic sinew. None bore a crimson core, yet the accuracy of their fire spoke of long familiarity with prey trapped on the wall. I breathed Hazeveil outward. Shadows rippled over me and the fresh ice, swallowing my outline; the lesser hunters lost track at once.

Yet not all were blind. Here and there a projectile curved unerringly toward the void where I hid. I glimpsed the source: thin, lizard-shaped things perched at different cave rims, their multiple pupils gleaming like Sharn's eyes. They sounded bursts of chitter; at those signals, every ordinary hunter redirected toward my position in perfect chorus. Coordination, not chance—and too precise to dismiss as mere instinct. Had Sjakthar stationed them here for this very purpose, or did the Abyss itself nurture sentinels for climbers bold enough to flee?

Questions could wait. I answered the barrage with territory. Frost bled from my aura, plating the nearest cave mouths in rime so thick the creatures inside froze mid-screech. I shattered three with a single lance of ice; fragments spun away, glistening. Then more shapes swarmed through the fog to replace them, wings and claws raking the darkness. Such was the Abyss: kill one, inherit three.

The climb became a battle of attrition—one metre upward, one heartbeat to parry, one heartbeat to cast frost at the fresh threat. When breath hitched, I rested only long enough to reform a foothold, never longer, never still. Above and below remained the same colourless cloud, the same dull roar of distant titan combat; only the ever-shifting pattern of cave mouths marked gradual ascent.

Ice groaned beneath my feet; splinters pinged off my hood; somewhere far underfoot a fallen lizard howled the whole way down. I answered with silence and another step, refusing to grant the watching God even the smallest retreat. Where one attacker died, three more arrived, and three after that, as so was the nature of the abyss.

The crawl of time dissolved into a smear of pain and motion. There was only the wall beneath my fingers, slick and shifting, and the rattle of breath in my cowl. I no longer risked re-entering the caves; every tunnel seemed to bend downward, back toward Sjakthar's furnace. This outward face of the Abyss was my single, costly chance at escape.

Yet the shaft had no end. Kilometres bled together until time meant nothing. My time outside the Abyss felt like legend. A whisper rose in my mind, treacherous as frost on rope. Perhaps there is nothing above. Perhaps Sharn spoke true, and the Abyss is all that exists.

If so, then Meris, her laughter, my promise that I would return, must also be an illusion. Lirien's quiet but firm teachings, Jharim's jokes, Elina's class, dream echoes drifting from a place that never was.

The thought near broke me.

Hours, or perhaps days, of climbing and constant skirmish passed. Hazeveil's aura guttered twice; each renewal cost more than the last. My frost formed thinner, dissolved sooner. I killed until I could no longer remember how many bodies spiralled into fog—first tens, then hundreds, then thousands. Still they came, born from distant holes by the scent of blood and the whisper of the God who wanted me to fall.

Finally even crimson endurance began to fray. Fingers split. The skin across my palms tore, healed, tore again until nerves screamed with every grip. Mana ran low; eventually I was no more than a mortal, a lone speck scrabbling up a god-forged prison.

That was when conviction returned—sharp, clean, unbearable. I thought of the promise I had sworn to Meris. To dare think of breaking such a promise. I couldn't.

I drove the edge of my bare foot into a sliver of stone, hauled myself higher, and felt the last sputter of mana gutter out. Seconds later a faint warmth kissed the back of my neck. Light, not the sickly glow of mana crystal, but true sunlight softened by fog, brushed my hood.

"Can it be?" The question rasped from a raw throat. I dared a glance upward. The murk above was lighter by the width of a hand, and that pale gleam painted silver edges along the ridges of the wall. Proof. The world outside was waiting, and my memories were real.

Warmth spread through aching knuckles, and for a heartbeat I believed I had won. Then reality folded.

A shape tore up the shaft from below, too fast to track—only the pressure wave of its passage, thunder without sound. Four wings, patterned like titanic butterfly scales, blossomed around a body carved in flawless symmetry. It hovered thirty metres off, bipedal and impossibly tall, as though a sculptor had chiseled perfection from marble and poured molten crimson into every vein. Its mere arrival smashed the lesser hunters into dust; their corpses peeled away from the wall and tumbled like autumn leaves.

Mana churned around the creature in tides, bending fog and stone alike. The weight of its aura bowed my knees; the wall groaned under the pressure. Instinct screamed the truth: this was a crimson warlock of Sjakthar—an apex emissary, fashioned with every advantage the God could bestow.

It raised one arm. The motion was languid, almost polite. I barely registered the gleam of talons before that arm settled again at its side, the gesture as graceful as shutting a book.

Pain had no time to arrive. I watched, detached, as ribbons of blood spun outward in slow arcs. My right hand, still gripping a spur of ice, was no longer attached to my wrist. Neither were the other three limbs. For a heartbeat my torso clung stubbornly to the foothold—then gravity claimed it, pulling me away from the wall and into open air.

The warlock did not pursue. It only watched, wings rippling with prismatic colour, as I began to drop. Sunlight—thin, uncertain—followed me for a dozen metres, catching on droplets of red that drifted like sparks. Then the upper haze swallowed the light, and the Pit's familiar grey gloom surged up to meet me.

The sunlight stayed on me a few seconds longer, a silent mercy, as my escape was cut short.