The walls closed in around them as they went down.
The light faded—not to darkness, but to something else. The twilight that had followed them from Valerion thinned, then disappeared, replaced by a glow that came from the walls themselves. It was pale, sickly, the color of rotting flesh, and it pulsed with the same rhythm as the thing below.
Kaelen felt the Binding stir.
"Home," the Whisperer said. "You are almost home."
He pushed it down, forced it back, but it was harder now. They were closer. The thing behind his eyes was waking, stretching, remembering what it had been before it was trapped inside him.
They walked in silence. The only sounds were their footsteps on the smooth stone and the distant pulse of the Breach. Once, Elyss gasped, and Kaelen turned to see her staring at the wall, at the shapes that moved within it—faces, hands, bodies pressed against the rock as if trying to escape.
"They're still in there," she whispered. "The ones who came before. They're still in there."
Kaelen took her arm, pulled her away. "Don't look. Don't stop. Keep moving."
They kept moving.
Hours passed. The fissure widened, then narrowed, then widened again. The walls changed from rock to something else—something that was soft under their hands, that gave off heat, that breathed. Kaelen walked with his eyes forward, not looking, not thinking about what they were touching.
And then, without warning, the fissure ended.
They stepped out into a cavern so vast that the walls were invisible, so high that the ceiling was lost in darkness. The floor was flat, smooth, polished to a mirror shine, and it reflected the glow from above in patterns that hurt to look at. At the center of the cavern, a mile away or a hundred, distance had lost its meaning, the Breach waited.
It was not what Kaelen remembered.
Four years ago, it had been a tear in the world, a wound that bled darkness. Now it was a door. A door made of light and shadow, of things that had no names, of geometries that shifted when he tried to focus on them. It was open. It had always been open. And on the other side, something was waiting.
"You see now," the Whisperer said. Its voice was no longer a whisper. It was a chorus, a thousand voices speaking as one, and Kaelen knew them. He had heard them before. They were the voices of his men, of Ren, of everyone who had touched the Breach and been taken.
"You see what you have always been."
Kaelen stood at the edge of the mirror floor, looking at the door, and felt the Binding rise up to meet him. It was not fighting him now. It was welcoming him. It was showing him what lay beneath the memory he had buried.
N/if you enjoy reading, support me with a stone.