The night pressed close, thick with voices rising from the very roots of the forest. Whispers twisted around Sawerigading and Jantaka, riding currents of unseen intention. With a raised hand, Sawerigading called for silence. Jantaka halted, senses sharpened, attuned to the faint laughter threading through the shadows. They had been tracing circles around the same half-lit grove for so long that time itself seemed to have unraveled since the search for Walakina began.
"These spirits toy with us," Sawerigading murmured, frustration tangling his words. "This is Waliala's echo, a mirror world of trickery, made to test wanderers who lose their way."
Jantaka's gaze swept the forest, eyes focusing on the branches overhead. Their bends and twists felt too ordered, like clues in a hidden riddle. "I don't think they mean only to trap us," he said. "They're watching, waiting to see what we'll give up to reach her."
The spirits launched their attack, not with violence, but with deception. Trees bent back revealing a lake of molten silver, its surface impossibly smooth. From its glowing center emerged a figure radiant in liquid light, her hair long and flowing, her eyes carrying the ache of centuries. Sawerigading gasped, his heart surging. "It is her… after all this time." Longing broke in his voice.
Jantaka, however, felt unease. He watched the figure closely. Her feet didn't rest on the water, they floated awkwardly, jerked by hidden strings, their movements wrong in ways only a seasoned wanderer would notice.
"Wait," Jantaka whispered urgently. "Look closer!"
The illusion shattered, the luminous lake collapsed into mud, and the figure splintered, dissolving into a crowd of jeering spirits whose laughter thrummed through the soil. Sawerigading bellowed, slashing with his kris, fighting phantoms who multiplied with every stroke. Anger spilled into the air; each cut birthed more false faces, more echoing laughter.
Jantaka closed his eyes, recalling the ancient legend of the red string, a bond not even spirits could sever. He called on it, not with hands but with his will, tugging at the invisible tie rooted in his soul. Suddenly, the world rippled; illusions split like veils torn open.
The spirits faltered for the first time. Their united laughter fractured into shrill screams. In that instant, Sawerigading saw his opening. He drove his blade deep into the ground, pouring not just fury but memory into the earth, the moment he'd faced Waliala, the fabled boundary of truth and illusion. The ground responded, splitting and swallowing the nearest spirit whole.
With each burst, the false Walakinas erupted and vanished, each leaving a silence sharp enough to sting.
But relief never came. The hush that followed felt loaded, charged with the gaze of something out of sight, something ancient.
The earth pulsed beneath them. From a pocket of dark emerged a voice, weathered and immense, reverberating in bone and mind: "You seek Walakina… but do you know whose dream you truly walk within?"
The forest convulsed, warping inward like the mouth of a vortex. Jantaka felt a tug in his chest, sudden, urgent, like the red string he'd called was being wound from the far side of reality. Sawerigading's grip tightened on his kris, trembling not in fear but in recognition.
"That voice…" he breathed. "It isn't Walakina's."
Jantaka stared wide-eyed into the deepening gloom. "Then whose?"
From the shadows, a colossal shape began to form, nothing like a spirit or deity, something older, more profound, a guiding force stretching back to the dawn of their journey together. The outline was just beginning to reveal itself when the world suddenly split, collapsing inward, leaving the answer hanging on the edge of the next page.