Kalem leaned heavily against the shattered crate, his breath a rasp in the stifling air. The lance he had forged — crude, vicious — rested against his shoulder. Before him, the colossal gate now bore a wound, a splintered fracture spider-webbing outward from where his weapon had struck.
Not broken. Not yet.
But weakened.
The pulse of mana from the gate had calmed for now, retreating inward, almost… brooding. Watching.
Kalem wiped the sweat from his brow and turned his gaze to the terrain beyond the clearing. Even here, the Abyss twisted in subtle ways: the rocks seemed to lean toward him, the light bent at odd angles, and the wind carried sounds that should not exist.
He needed to understand more before he made the final breach. If this place had been sealed for so long, there must be signs— remnants of those who had dared approach it before him.
Drawing a deep breath, Kalem pressed on, dragging his battered body toward the broken landscape around the gate.
It didn't take long to find the first settlement.
At the edge of the clearing, half-sunken into a sloping ravine, lay the remains of a camp — or what had once been a camp. Tattered banners, bleached by unnatural forces, fluttered weakly from rotted poles. Collapsed tents sprawled across the ground like the discarded skins of dead animals.
Kalem crouched by a shattered firepit, brushing aside thick layers of dust and decay. Charred bones lay within, twisted into shapes that suggested not warmth and camaraderie, but ritual and desperation.
Human bones.
And something else.
Kalem frowned, picking up a fragment of a jawbone — elongated, sharpened, not quite fitting any creature he recognized.
"The Abyss changes everything it touches," he muttered. "Even the ones who think they can live in it."
He moved slowly through the ruins, noting the signs of habitation — makeshift tools, scraps of armor reforged into crude weapons, walls hastily constructed from scavenged stones.
But there was something off about it all.
Too much was fused to the ground, melded as if the earth itself had begun to reclaim — or consume — them.
The voices, ever present, whispered:
"Roots without soil." "Dreams without sky." "Families turned to hunger."
Kalem pressed deeper into the ruins.
There were crude carvings on some of the stones — symbols he didn't fully recognize, though a few were eerily similar to Abyssal glyphs he'd seen etched in the deeper layers.
The settlements had not merely adapted to the Abyss; they had embraced it. Or perhaps, been embraced by it.
Further in, he found what must have been a shrine.
It was little more than a slab of blackened rock surrounded by offerings — broken weapons, shattered crystals, even severed limbs laid out with grim reverence.
The idol at its center was grotesque — a figure without clear form, its limbs twisted in impossible directions, its "face" a mass of gaping mouths.
Kalem stared at it for a long moment, his stomach twisting.
They hadn't worshiped to escape.
They had worshiped to belong.
"This is what happens," Kalem said quietly, "when survival becomes surrender."
Something shifted nearby — a faint scraping sound.
Kalem whirled, fire sword raised.
From the shadows between the broken stones, a figure lurched forward.
It wore armor once, long ago — now fused to its flesh, the plates sunken and rotted into its very bones.
Its eyes — or what remained of them — were hollow sockets, leaking dark mist. Its mouth worked in slow, mindless spasms.
Kalem stepped back carefully, watching as more shapes stirred behind it.
Not creatures.
Not even monsters.
Remnants.
The settlers, long since consumed by the Abyss, still moving under some awful imitation of life.
"Forgotten." "Forsaken." "Family."
Kalem gritted his teeth, forcing the murmuring voices to the back of his mind.
He could fight them — easily, compared to what he had faced — but that wasn't the point.
They weren't enemies.
They were warnings.
He lowered his sword slightly and backed away, watching as the figures shuffled aimlessly through the ruined camp, unaware, bound to some unbroken instinct to protect, to wait, to serve a purpose that had long since lost all meaning.
Kalem turned his back on them and continued his grim exploration.
Further out, beyond the first settlement, he found the remnants of others — camps within camps, like echoes of failed civilizations stacked atop each other. Each more distorted than the last.
Structures melted into the landscape.
Weapons that had sprouted like bone out of the ground.
And always, the hints of something other among them — non-human architecture, languages that twisted the mind to even attempt understanding.
The Abyss was not just a wound.
It was a trap.
A garden of rot, cultivated over countless eras, each generation feeding the next cycle of madness.
Kalem knelt by a collapsed tent and picked up a scrap of parchment, marveling that it had survived.
The words written there were barely legible — a scrawl of desperation:
"No end. No light. We built walls to hold the dark, but the dark built walls in us."
Kalem closed his eyes for a moment.
The Abyss didn't need to kill you outright.
It just needed time.
"You think you can resist," Kalem whispered to himself. "You think you're different."
He opened his eyes and stared toward the fractured gate, the lance still embedded in its surface, waiting.
"I am different."
The ground shuddered faintly beneath his feet — not from the passage of monsters, but from the gate itself.
Something stirring in its depths.
Some ancient, patient horror finally noticing the thorn in its flesh.
Kalem rose to his feet and drew his fire sword once more.
He would not be the next forgotten settler.
He would break through.
Or die so spectacularly that even the Abyss would remember his name.