The wind shifted. A howling limb and low rose from the horizon.
Dozens of eyes blinked open across the ruins. Hollow figures shuffled into view, silhouettes bound in iron, tall and emaciated, featured cloaked in chains.
Some dragged blades behind them. Others bore brands etched into their skin, their flesh scorched in the shape of manacled and binding runes. Their eyes were hollow. As if their souls were gone.
[They are Chainborn,] the Voice said. [Once glorious warriors, now thralls to the warlords. Their purpose is to hunt the free.]
Veyra pulled closer to Aelric, eyes narrowing. "They don't bleed. They don't think. They only obey orders like a puppet."
One of the Chainborn stepped forward, its gaze locking in Aelric's shackles. It let out a screech of rust in rust, raising a rusted flail. The others echoed the gesture.
They had seen his Chains and sensed that he was very powerful. But they still attacked.
"Run?" Veyra asked with half a smirk.
"No," Aelric said. "Let them come, we will fight."
The Chainborn surged forward, no screams, no battle cries. Just a cold inevitability of battle.
Aelric surged to meet them, his shackles uncoiling like serpents of steel, lashing out with brutal precision. Iron Bind activated mid-swing, wrapping one creature's limbs and wrenching them backward with a snap.
Another leapt over the wreckage, but Veyra's illusions disoriented its mirrors, forming midair to splinter its perception.
Three blades struck Aelric's torso. Pain lanced through him. But Devourer's Bloom pulsed, drawing energy from the blow itself.
He gritted his teeth, grabbing the nearest Chainborn by the face and letting the Bloom feed. Black energy courses up his arms.
[Don't feed too deep!] The Voice warned. [These are echoed, and they are full of poisonous memories.]
Aelric roared, the borrowed energy surging into his chains. He spun, releasing it in a burst, severing three enemies mid-motion. The others hesitated.
"They are… afraid?" He asked.
"No," Veyra said. "It's just, they recognize you."
Aelric stood tall, breathing heavily. The Chainborn were retreating, not in terror, but in obedience. To something behind them.
A shape began to rise in the distance. A towering figure, cloaked in links of obsidian and molten silver, its voice rasped against the realm like blades on bone.
"A shackle Bearer walks this land," it hissed. " A thief of dominion and a pretender to chaincraft."
Aelric met its gaze and didn't flinch. "Let them come. I will master this layer. Or it will drown in my shadow."
The creature stared at him for a second, then receded into the fog, its judgment deferred but not forgotten.
Aelric turned. The chains in the sky were still shifting, now whispering in his ears, soft promises and cruel truths. He had crossed a threshold of no return. This was no longer survival. It was a conquest.
They started to travel again. After walking for a few days, he again found a cave that was going down.
He looks at Veyra; they both nod to each other and jump into it.
The descent had ended not with a crash as they expected, but with a silence so total it felt violent.
Aelric's boots met the ground with crunchch, not stone, not ash, but something more brittle. Bones, fragments of rib cages, cracked femurs, and long forgotten horns crumbled beneath his step like dried leaves.
The second layer seemed to have no sun anywhere, and no sky, only an unyielding dome of storm churned red black clouds that churned like blood in a bowl.
The air was thicker here, clotted with decay and pressure. Aelric's first breath was like inhaling a lot of dust and old rust.
The landscape sprawled before him in a ruinous sprawl; an endless expanse of jagged terrain where mountainous spires of broken flesh rose like monoliths from the earth, and across it, almost stretching from horizon to horizon, hung the chains.
There are thousands of them. Thick as trees or slender as spider silk, they danced through the air like forgotten tendrils of some ancient god.
Some anchored into the ground, others floating weightlessly into the sky, vanishing into the clouds where no heavens waited. They rattled with no wind, hummed with no reason, as if mourning something lost before time began.
"What…is this place? Aelric asked.
[The Chained Wastes,] the Voice answered, its tone unusually hushed and reverent. [A graveyard of punishment. Here, the old ones are bound by their failures, souls, demons, perhaps even gods. It is a domain where sin is chained and never forgiven.]
Veyra stood beside him, her expression unreadable. Her once fiery eyes dulled, caught in a memory that refused to fade.
"You have been here before," Aelric said.
"I have seen it in visions,* she replied. "No one walks this place and returns the same."
They advanced cautiously, each step echoing across a quiet that defied the natural. Around them, the skeletal remains of massive beings, some are larger than castles, lay wrapped in barbed chains.
The bones had not decayed with time; they pulsed faintly with an inner glow, as though the agony of their owners still smoldered within.
Suddenly, the ground shifted. Aelric raised his hand, the Soulbound Shackles tightening around his wrists instinctively.
There was a movement from the shadows of a crumbled pillar, emerged a figure, gaunt, wrapped in iron links that dug into fleshless limbs.
Its face was a skull adorned with ritual carvings, its sockets weeping tar. More rose behind it, dragging their chains like mourners. The Chainborn. Dozens of them are coming at the same time.
[They are not as same as Chainborn as before,] the Voice said. [They are remnants of guilt so deep it rewrites their being]
The Chainborn moved with no urgency. Their approach was deliberate and patient. Their chains writhed of their own accord, snaking through the air as if scenting Aelric's fear. And in that moment, he understood, they weren't hunting him for meat or vengeance.
They wanted to bind him. Seeing that they came within his range. Aelric lunged forward, Iron Bind flaring to life.