Kalem walked alone.
The light of his fire blade flickered with fatigue, a pulsing ember more than a blaze now. He wasn't saving energy anymore—he just didn't have much left. The air down here had changed. It was no longer cold or hot, but wrong, a constant low vibration that hummed against his bones like the deep groan of a dying world.
His boots scraped along obsidian-like stone streaked with moss and fine threads of crystal. Every now and then, the surface squelched, and he didn't look down.
The voice had stopped echoing. It no longer drifted like wind or filtered in like memory. It was beside him now—just behind his left shoulder, just inside his ear.
"You're slower now," it said. Not as a taunt. Not a hiss. Almost fond. "You used to charge in. Break things. Trust that bull to clean up the mess."
Kalem's jaw locked. His grip tightened on the fire blade's hilt.
"You don't even know what day it is anymore," it went on. "Not that it matters. But you used to care. You marked time like a soldier. Now? You mark it by how many bites you took out of a moss wall."
Kalem didn't answer. Not yet.
He dragged the crate behind him by a bent length of cable. It skidded over uneven terrain with a sound that made his teeth itch. He'd lightened it days ago, throwing away the damaged pieces, the useless gadgets. All that was left was steel, flame, and function.
He coughed—a dry, brittle sound. Something black hit the ground.
"I think," said the voice, "you're remembering him again."
A flicker in the air. Kalem could almost see Onyx's silhouette beside him, just out of reach, just out of time. The way his hoofbeats had echoed in tandem with the cart wheels, a rhythm Kalem hadn't realized he missed until it was gone.
"How he looked," the voice continued, musing. "When the ridge broke. When the ground swallowed you both. But he didn't fall with you, did he? He fell first. Alone."
Kalem stopped walking. The fire blade hissed as it hit the ground beside his foot.
"Shut up," he whispered.
"He trusted you," the voice pressed, circling now, a thought made solid. "More than you deserved. More than anyone ever has. He never even saw it coming. But you did. You saw the ridge tremble. You knew."
"I said—" Kalem turned, roaring. "SHUT UP!"
He slashed at the air. The fire blade's arc illuminated nothing but emptiness.
The shadows swallowed it back up.
Then: quiet.
He breathed hard, hunched, muscles shaking.
A pause.
Then the voice came again—lower now, as if it had leaned in to whisper right into his ear:
"Why are you yelling at yourself?"
Kalem froze.
"What…" he said, voice rasped dry, "what are you?"
And that's when it said it:
"We're already speaking from the same place."
It didn't say "you and I." It didn't claim to be separate. The voice had no edges anymore. No origin. It was inside the shape of his own thoughts, indistinguishable from them.
Kalem stumbled away from the walls. Every surface felt like it was pulsing now. The ground quivered beneath his boots. His chest ached.
He kept walking.
Time blurred. It always did down here. He didn't count steps. He counted breaths between pain spikes. Counted how many fingers were going numb. How many drops of salve he had left. How many times he thought about just lying down and not getting back up.
Eventually, the tunnel widened. Not into a room—more like a gallery of jagged stone, slick with some faintly glowing algae. The light was faint, sickly green, but enough for him to see what was ahead.
A wall.
And symbols.
Hundreds of them.
Not etched, not burned—drawn. Written in blood and ash, some smeared by time or decay, some fresh enough to still look wet. Names, mostly. Or at least approximations of names. Some were just letters. Others were symbols—tribal marks, soldier badges, sigils from forgotten legions.
Kalem stood before it. He stepped closer, drawn without knowing why. His gaze moved across the scrawl until it landed on something that halted his breath.
KALEM.
Not a coincidence. Not a mistake. It was his name. Written in deep, trembling strokes. Not just present—but centered, framed between two other marks: an inverted triangle, and a spiral shaped like a broken horn.
He stared.
The voice was silent now.
Kalem crouched, opened one of the crate's side panels, and pulled a thin obsidian blade from the lining—something he had kept tucked away, a relic from his early descent. A weapon fragment, sharp and black as memory.
He pressed it to the wall beneath his name.
And carved.
Not words. A mark.
Two diagonal slashes crossing like a skewed X, bisected by a jagged downward stroke. Nothing glorious. But personal.
A refusal.
He carved slow, breathing heavily, bleeding a little from the hand that pressed the blade too hard. But when it was done, he sat back against the cold stone, staring at the mark he'd made.
He hadn't erased his name.
He had answered it.
He waited there for what felt like hours, the weight of his exhaustion pressing down.
The voice didn't speak again.
When he finally stood, he left a smear of blood on the rock as he pushed off, eyes sunken but resolute. His fire blade hissed back to life in his grip.
Kalem walked on—alone still, but not nameless.
Not yet.