Kalem had long stopped trusting the light.
Still, when he saw it—golden and pure, hanging high above in the endless gloom of the Abyss—he froze.
It wasn't torchlight, not a reflection from his gear. No rune flicker or bioluminescent trap. This was sunlight. Or something that looked like it. Shafts of it poured from a fissure high up in the Abyss's ceiling, filtering down in warm, gleaming streams that shimmered on the jagged stone and made even the rot-veins of the wall seem beautiful.
For a moment, everything felt real again.
He stood at the edge of a fractured ledge, body aching, cloak in tatters, breath fogging in the chill air. The heat of his wounds still radiated from under the half-melted armor strapped to his ribs. His hands trembled—not from fear, not from exhaustion, but from a ghost called hope.
He tasted it.
Like mountain mornings and rising winds.
Like Onyx's breath at sunrise.
Kalem's jaw tightened.
"It's a lie," he whispered to himself.
No voice replied.
Not even the one that had been gnawing at the edges of his sanity.
Still… he climbed.
Not because he believed the light was real—but because he needed to know. Needed to test it. Just in case. If he ignored it and it was real…
He couldn't live with that.
The climb was brutal. The walls here didn't obey gravity the way the surface did. Protrusions jutted out at odd angles. Some pieces moved when touched. Others seemed to recoil from contact, as if the stone were skin and bone, not mineral. His floating crate of weapons—still miraculously intact—hummed behind him as he drew upon the hook-blade to scale the vertical stretch.
Every few meters, he paused to scratch a rune into the wall. His own trail. A promise to himself that he was making progress.
But as he went higher, the light didn't change.
No closer. No clearer.
Still the same soft glow.
Still far out of reach.
After what felt like hours, Kalem reached a wide platform carved naturally into the cliff face. He collapsed there, letting his legs dangle, sweat freezing on his brow. His breath was ragged, and a sharp pain curled in his lower back. A cracked rib, maybe two. His water was gone, the moss in his satchel barely enough to chew. Magic was low, but stable. The fire sword flickered once in its scabbard like a heartbeat, as if sensing his thoughts.
And the light… it hadn't moved.
He looked at the runes he'd etched on the way up.
There were five.
But as he looked back down…
There were eight.
Kalem's eyes narrowed. He wiped them. Counted again.
Still eight.
He swore under his breath.
He hadn't made progress.
He'd been moving, but the world hadn't. Either that or the Abyss had folded on itself again—looped space, curved perception, whatever madness it used to trap wanderers like insects in a web.
And worst of all… now that he truly stared at the light, he saw the truth.
It flickered.
Not in intensity, but subtly, like an eye blinking. As if something massive were behind it. Watching. Masked.
Watching him.
His fingers curled around the hilt of a shortblade. He didn't draw it—he wasn't going to swing at a trick of the mind—but it was comforting. The cold iron was real.
He turned to move again—and that was when he saw it.
Embedded in the wall to his left, like a statue half-sunk in tar, was a creature.
No.
Not a creature.
A thing.
It was massive—easily fifteen meters tall. A warped fusion of humanoid and insectoid features. One half of its body had fused into the Abyss wall entirely, veins of glowing blue webbing threading between flesh and stone. The other half—exposed—looked like it had once been a predator. Jagged plates of bone layered over sinew, spines arcing down a ruined back, and a gaping hole where a chest should've been. Its mouth was open mid-scream, jaw unhinged, cracked down the middle.
One eye remained.
And it blinked.
Kalem froze. He did not speak. He didn't breathe.
The eye didn't track him. It didn't focus. Just twitched.
Then… it closed.
And that was it.
The air around the thing crackled faintly. Kalem felt heat there—an old, residual hum like dormant machinery or dead magic. He approached slowly, blades ready but unraised. A gut feeling told him it wasn't going to move. That it couldn't.
Still, it wanted to.
Buried near its fused shoulder, he saw something pulsing.
Like a wound that hadn't closed.
Kalem reached in with gloved hands and carefully cut free a chunk of tissue. It was soft, yet crystalline. Almost like forged resin. Gold veins ran through it, and it shimmered faintly with the same color as the false light above.
It hummed faintly.
He sealed it in a containment vial and labeled it:
Abyssal Hybrid Residue — Tempered Core.
Note: Light-reactive. Possibly alchemical?
He didn't smile. Just tucked it away.
As he turned back to the climb, the false sunlight above dimmed slightly.
It was subtle.
But it was there.
Kalem stood still for a moment longer, then dropped to one knee and placed a rune dagger into the stone near the wall's base. He etched a single word in the Abyssal dialect beneath it:
LIE.
He'd seen too much now to pretend otherwise.
The Abyss wasn't just terrain.
It was a mind.
A will.
It offered hope because it knew that hope was the sharpest bait.
And Kalem—injured, exhausted, and mourning—was still a living flame. Still fighting.
It wanted to snuff that out.
Not through death.
But by making him choose to stop.
He stood again. Shouldered his crate. Switched out one of his dented vambraces for a spare. Adjusted the pressure bands on his leg to stop a slow leak of blood.
Above, the light flickered once more.
Then blinked out entirely.
Kalem looked up at the now-empty shaft.
"Good," he said aloud, voice rough and hoarse. "Now I don't have to look at it anymore."
He turned his back on the wall and began the slow descent into the next layer of dark.
And as he went, something scraped lightly across the stone behind him.
Just once.
Almost like applause.