The guardians started to attack in pairs now, each adapted to different forms of combat, one a four-armed brute who shattered the ground with every step, another a slithering serpent creature that emitted mind-warping shrieks.
Aelric fought like a man possessed; he had no choice. Chains lashed, souls drained, bones shattered.
Veyra's illusions fragmented the battlefield, turning every moment into a game of misdirection and assassination.
The Voice called out split-second decisions, calculating threats and opening. Three more fell.
But Aelric was tiring. His soul ached from overexertion. His chains grew heavy, as if resisting him. For a second, he relaxed his senses.
One of the guardians managed to cleave into his side, black ichor splattering the ground. Veyra fortunately caught him mid-stumble, her eyes fierce.
"We need to end this now or we won't survive."
"Working on it."
He staggered to his feet and invoked both skills at once, Iron Bind fused with Devourer's Bloom, then amplified through the chains, which still bore the remnants of the Abyssal Forge.
The ground beneath the guardians erupted into spiked tendrils of binding steel, which pierced their limbs, anchoring them in place. Then Aelric unleashed a pulse of energy that tore through their bound forms, revealing their spectral cores.
One final guardian stood. The largest of all, a king among the fallen, its crown rusted into its skull. It knelt as if awaiting judgment. Aelric approached, breathing heavily.
"I have killed your kin. You still want to fight?"
It raised its eyes. Then bowed again. Aelric hesitated only for a moment before driving the chains through its chest. The silent guardian died with grace.
The lake responded immediately. A column of water rose behind the Monarch's throne, swirling with stars and darkness, a portal to the next layer of the Abyss.
The Monarch stood, her voice like a requiem. "You have fulfilled the pact. Passage is granted."
But as Aelric turned to go, her voice pierced his mind once more.
"You carry the scent of kings. You are becoming something dangerous. Remember this, Aelric of the Chains' power is never silent. It always speaks. Eventually, it screams."
Then the world blurred, as Aelric stepped into the portal. The moment he set foot into the portal, it felt as though reality folded in on itself.
His body was weightless, his senses stretched and dulled, vision fragmented into streaks of shadow and flame, sound reduced to a low, constant hum that pulsed with the beat of a heart far larger than his own.
There was no up or down, only motion. He drifted, or perhaps was drawn, through a chasm of cascading void light, as if the Abyss itself were exhaling.
[This is not a passage.] The Voice said inside his mind, tinged with a hint of reverence. [It is a baptism.]
The portal released him gently, too gently, and Aelric collapsed onto solid ground, gasping like a man reborn.
He rolled to his side, every muscle taut, the Soulbound shackles rattling with the echoes of a thousand deaths.
The air was different here. Colder, yes, but cleaner in a way that set his nerves on edge, as though the world had been scoured for anything comforting.
A skyless ceiling looked high above, pulsing like the belly of a great beast. Shifting lights danced across it, not stars but eyes slumbering, dreaming, watching.
The floor beneath him was not stone, but hardened sinew veined with silver. Every step would be upon the flesh of the Abyss itself.
He rose slowly, checking his side where the guardian's blade had struck him. The wound still burned. But Veyra's salve had slowed the infection.
Or perhaps the Abyss was feeding on it now. He wasn't sure which possibility disturbed him more.
As he was in deep thought, a sudden rustling sound broke the silence.
Veyra slowly emerged from the portal behind him, cloaked in shadows that had not been part of her before.
Her expression was unreadable, her posture more relaxed than he had ever seen. As if being closer to the Abyss comforted her.
"This…place," she whispered, voice low and reverent. "I remember the echoes of it."
Aelric eyes her warily. "You remember too much for someone who claims to be cursed."
She smirked, the curve of her lips half amusement, half threat. "Curses don't erase memory. They sharpen it."
'The more Veyra talked, the more Aelric began to doubt, every time she talked, what she said before was revealed to be a lie. It becomes hard to tell which is a lie and which is the truth.'
Before he could press further, the space around them shifted. The portal behind them twisted into a whirl of silver light, and from its core emerged the silent Monarch, though this time, she floated, her throne absent, her veils trailing like ink in water.
Her presence was less oppressive here, but more intimate, like a breath on the back of the neck.
Aelric instinctively raised his guard. Veyra knelt beside him, head bowed.
"You have followed my will,* the Monarch said, bed voice like bells submerged in oil. "But no gift from the Abyss is ever free."
With a motion too swift to follow, she extended a hand towards Aelric's chest. He flinched, but something in his chains perhaps held him in place.
Her fingers pressed against his sternum. The touch was ice and fire all at once, and then came an intense pain.
Not the physical kind, but something deeper. His soul, already delayed by battles and bargains, recoiled as her power etched itself into his essence.
A symbol was slowly burned into his flesh; a crescent crown broken by a vertical line, nestled in a circle of Thorned branches. It pulsed for once with dark light before slowly fading beneath his skin.
[This is a sigil of Descent given to people who go to the next realm.] The voice intoned. [A mark that binds you to this realm, and sends signals of your arrival to everything below.]