The liquid shadow did not pass. It coiled around Sineus, a vortex of pure memory that ignored the world of matter. The cold was absolute, a void where warmth had never been. He was the eye of a storm made of forgotten grief, and the wet tearing sound was inside his skull now. Fedor’s shield was a useless circle of steel, five meters away but in another world. The darkness had swallowed them all.
The screaming faces in the tide pressed close. They were not hostile. They were questioning. The whispers that had been a meaningless hiss at the edge of hearing now focused, coalescing into a query that had no sound. It was the shriek of a system encountering an error it could not compute.
He was a thing that should not be. A man who could see the Pod-sloy, the ghostly layer of the past, yet was made of solid flesh. A living memory and a living man. The Blight, a sea of discarded history, could not categorize him. It could not unmake him, for he was anchored in truth. It could not ignore him, for he was a beacon of order in its chaos. He was a paradox. A stone in the gears of its unmaking engine.
The storm of memory stopped trying to understand him. It simply resolved the contradiction. The Blight chose to move the anomaly instead of trying to break it.
The world twisted. It was not a movement through space, but a folding of it. The ground beneath his horse vanished. The grey light of the valley was gone. There was no up or down, only a nauseating pull in every direction at once—a feeling like falling and being crushed simultaneously. The wet tearing sound became a final, deafening snap. Then, nothing.
The silence was perfect. The motion ceased.
A faint scent of ozone touched the air.
Solid ground slammed into his horse’s hooves. The animal, already panicked, stumbled and fell with a shriek of pain and shattered bone. Sineus was thrown clear, landing hard on a surface that was cold and unyielding. The impact jarred his teeth. He pushed himself up, his hands scraping against jagged, dark metal.
He was on a vast platform of black iron. It was uneven, as if forged from a thousand broken blades fused together. Fedor was nearby, already on his feet, his shield up and his axe in hand. The captain of his guard was pale, but his eyes were scanning for threats. Alani, the guide from the Forest Folk, lay slumped over her own horse’s neck, conscious but barely. The two silent guides from the Golden Road Consortium were gone. The Blight had taken only the three of them.
Sineus got to his feet and walked to the edge of the iron platform. There was no ground below. They were floating in a pocket of stillness carved from chaos. The air was cold and thin, smelling of ozone and hot metal.
All around them, the Blight churned. But this was not the mindless, creeping fog of the borderlands. This was a tamed beast. In the hazy distance, vast tornadoes of whispering shadow writhed in slow, deliberate patterns, contained by some unseen force. They were pillars holding up a sky of grey despair.
This was not a natural phenomenon. This was a prison. A workshop. A place where someone had taken the world’s agony and given it a purpose. The raw power on display was immense, far greater than the petty memory-cutting of nobles in Belogorod or traders on the Golden Road.
Fedor moved to his side, his voice a low growl.
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” Sineus answered, his gaze fixed on the impossible landscape. He thought of the merchant lord, Timur Makhmudov, and his easy promises. The shortcut. The manageable cost.
Alani stirred, pushing herself upright. She looked out at the controlled chaos, her face ashen.
“This place is a wound,” she whispered. “But it is a wound that has been weaponized.”
Sineus did not have an answer. He only knew that the shortcut had led them not to the Sunken Scriptorium of Ur, but to the heart of a power that did not just feed the Blight. It commanded it.
A low grinding sound echoed from the darkness ahead, the protest of metal on metal.
A ramp of black iron lowered from the darkness ahead
