The forest thinned until there were no more trees—only bare earth and sky.
Lucas and Lyss emerged onto a wide plateau veiled in mist. A cold wind drifted across the ground, carrying the scent of old stone and something older still. In the center of the clearing stood another rune stone—taller than the first, fractured down the middle like it had been struck by lightning and somehow survived.
Lucas stepped forward cautiously. "That it?"
Lyss nodded. "Second marker."
Her voice was quiet. Focused.
This one looked even more ancient than the first. The carvings were deeper, etched with a precision that didn't belong to human hands. The runes didn't glow. Not yet.
Lyss knelt beside it and began drawing a series of small glyphs in the dirt using a silver piece of chalk from her satchel. The wind didn't blow them away.
Lucas watched her, arms crossed.
"You sure this one's stable?"
She didn't look up. "It always was."
That choice of words made something in Lucas itch.
Lyss placed both palms on the runes and closed her eyes. Her aura flared—subtle but precise, threading into the ancient patterns like a key slipping into a lock.
The stone responded. Slowly.
Light bled from the runes, a dull violet glow pulsing outward in steady intervals.
"Now," she said, glancing at Lucas, "touch the center."
Lucas stepped forward, hesitant, but repeated the motion from before—placing his hand directly in the middle of the carvings.
There was a moment of silence.
Then the glow intensified.
And then—
Everything went wrong.
At first, it was just the usual pulse of power beneath Lucas's palm.
Familiar. Manageable.
Then came the hum—a low, building vibration that spread through his bones, as if the stone had awakened with something it hadn't meant to show.
Lucas stepped back instinctively, but his hand remained frozen against the surface.
The glow flared violently, runes burning bright purple. A rush of heat surged through the air, followed by a pressure that made his ears ring. The ground beneath them shook—subtly at first, then hard enough to rattle loose stones across the plateau.
"Lyss?" Lucas asked through clenched teeth.
She turned sharply toward the stone, alarm in her eyes for the first time since they'd left the Stronghold.
"This isn't how it's supposed to—"
A flash erupted from the rune stone.
The world snapped.
Reality twisted inward.
Lucas felt the ground vanish beneath him as the light consumed everything. His vision went white, then black, then everything and nothing at once.
There was no falling.
There was no time.
Only the cold, and the silence, and the sickening lurch of being moved.
Then—darkness.
Stillness.
Lucas woke with a jolt, breath catching in his throat.
He coughed, rolled onto his side, and tasted dust.
The ground beneath him was solid stone—rough, cracked, cold. Not the same as before. Not even close.
His head throbbed, and the space behind his eyes pulsed like he'd been struck by lightning.
He sat up slowly.
The sky above was dark, but not night—an unnatural twilight covered in thick clouds, tinged with the faint shimmer of violet and crimson hues. The air itself felt... warped, as if gravity didn't quite know what direction it wanted to settle on.
There was no sign of the forest. No rune stone. No trail back.
Just stone. Endless, ancient stone.
Across from him, Lyss stirred. She sat up with a sharp inhale, blinking as she took in their surroundings. Her usually composed expression broke—only for a moment—as her gaze swept the horizon.
Then came the whisper, almost too soft to hear:
"…This has never happened before."
Lucas looked at her, breathing heavy.
"You think?"
She didn't respond.
No sarcasm this time. No snide remarks.
Just silence.
Lucas stood, brushing off his coat. He summoned his scythe out of instinct, feeling its familiar weight land in his hand.
'Shadow…?'
Nothing.
No presence.
Not even that distant chill in the back of his mind.
He frowned.
'Where the hell are we?'
The space around them stretched in every direction. Towering cliffs. Deep ridges. The very ground curved subtly, like they were standing on the flattened peak of something impossibly massive.
It wasn't a valley.
It was a mountain—one that spanned farther than the eye could follow.
And they were alone.
Lucas turned in a slow circle, his boots grinding over the fractured stone. No matter where he looked, the landscape remained the same—cold, harsh, massive.
A mountain… but unlike any he'd seen in either world.
The ground stretched out in uneven terraces, some jagged and broken, others smooth as if worn down by ancient footsteps. Towering walls of obsidian rock formed distant ridges, wrapped in mist. And above them, the sky churned with silent, colorless clouds that pulsed with faint veins of red and violet.
He turned to Lyss, who remained still, her gaze fixed far ahead.
"You know where we are?" he asked, quietly.
"No," she replied, without hesitation. "I've never seen this place. Not in any map, not in the archives, not in the sealed records of my family."
She took a slow step forward, eyes narrowing.
"It's possible we were sent to one of the unexplored zones. The Crucible's vast. There are regions no one's ever mapped… or returned from."
Lucas tensed. "You're saying we've been dumped into a dead zone."
"I'm saying…" She exhaled. "We're on our own."
A gust of wind blew past them, carrying with it the scent of scorched stone and… something else.
Like a memory burning.
Lucas looked to the horizon. He could see no end. No city. No people.
Just the vast expanse of something old, forgotten, and completely unwelcoming.
'Of course. Why would anything ever go right?'
He rested the scythe on his shoulder, staring off into the distance.
'This place… it feels like a graveyard no one remembers.'
Lyss remained quiet, her jaw clenched.
For once, neither of them had a plan.
The silence between them stretched.
Lyss crossed her arms, eyes scanning the endless terrain. Lucas remained still, the scythe balanced lazily on his shoulder, though his gaze never stopped shifting.
No roads. No shelter. No signs of life.
Just endless stone and cold wind.
"What now?" he finally asked, breaking the silence.
Lyss didn't answer immediately. She knelt beside a smooth patch of ground, brushing away dust with her fingers. No runes. No markings. Nothing.
"We're not getting back the way we came," she said at last. "The stone's gone. Or… whatever was using it."
Lucas looked around again. The wind made a soft howling noise as it passed through a nearby crevice.
"No food," he muttered. "No water."
"No cover," Lyss added.
'No godsdamn idea where we are.'
He let out a slow breath.
"Alright. So what's the plan, princess?"
Lyss shot him a sharp glance, but didn't rise to the bait.
"We move," she said. "High ground, first. Maybe we find something—an anomaly, a landmark. If we stay in one place, we die."
Lucas tilted his head. "And what are we supposed to eat? Air?"
Her tone remained calm, but her posture tightened.
"If this is part of The Crucible—and I believe it is—then there's always something. Plants. Creatures. Water hidden beneath rock or mist. We'll find it."
He gave her a look.
"You sound pretty sure for someone who's never been here."
"I've survived worse," she said simply.
Lucas snorted. "Yeah? Try two weeks alone in the dark with a scorpion the size of a truck breathing down your neck and being kil..." he didn't finish what he was saying.
She smirked. Barely.
"Try years in a Stronghold full of people pretending to care about you while waiting for you to fail, or better, rival families aiming for your head."
That shut him up.
After a moment, he turned away, eyes narrowed toward the distant cliffs.
"…We move, then."
"Good," she replied, already adjusting the straps on her satchel.
And so they did.
Two shadows walking across an endless stone giant, with no direction, no resources… and no way back.