The fog had weight now.
It pressed against Cipher's skin like a wet cloth, dragging with every step he took. The Crawling Lands had been alive, but this place—this corridor of rejection—felt aware. Every breath echoed, too loud and too near, as though the world was repeating his sounds back to him an instant late.
He gripped his scythe tighter. "Auto. Report."
Static hissed. Then Auto's voice came, distorted. "—terrain integrity at… sixty—correction—unreadable. Distortion field amplitude… looping. You have walked this path seven times."
Cipher stopped. Looked back.
Behind him stretched the same cracked plain of black sand, scattered bones, and the twisted husks of collapsed monuments. But the footprints trailing behind him were all fresh—seven sets, diverging and then converging again like ripples.
He exhaled through his teeth. "Denied Zones."
He'd read about them once—worlds that refused continuity. They denied forward motion, rewriting reality in cycles until intruders broke or starved. Here, progress itself was an enemy.
He turned forward again and walked.
For a time—minutes or years—he advanced through the same terrain. A ribcage arch. A broken mirror. A pile of shattered swords. Then the world reset. The ribcage stood whole again, the swords unbroken, his wound freshly bleeding as if time itself mocked him.
Auto's light flickered erratically. "Cipher—pattern repetition… eight cycles confirmed. Memory cohesion… degrading."
"Then anchor to me," Cipher said, voice strained. "Track resonance, not location."
Auto's core pulsed in response, syncing with the glow of Cipher's scythe. But even that began to fade, as if the air consumed light.
At the ninth cycle, Cipher stopped pretending he could walk his way out. He planted the scythe in the ground and forced resonance through it. A pulse of starlight exploded outward, briefly revealing the world as it truly was—a void of tangled strings and fragments of stories glued together like patchwork flesh.
When the light dimmed, he was somewhere else entirely.
The ground quivered beneath him. The air thrummed with a low, harmonic hum—like the resonance of a struck bell, stretching through his bones. Cipher froze. The sound wasn't environmental.
It was alive.
The fog parted.
From the haze came figures—half a dozen at first, then more—shuffling like puppets dangling from invisible strings. They looked human only at a glance. Upon closer view, their forms were blurred, overlapping outlines of many people fused into one shape. Faces multiplied across shoulders and chests, mouths open in silent chant.
Auto's scanners clicked weakly. "Unknown entities. Frequency interference—"
The figures screamed.
Not words—just noise. A pitch so high and sharp that it cracked the air itself. The vibration hit Cipher like a hammer, slamming into his chest and head. His ears burst with pain. Auto's systems howled with feedback, its voice fracturing into nonsense.
Cipher dropped to one knee, pressing a hand to his temple. His vision blurred. The ground rippled beneath him, waves of pressure distorting reality. The scream didn't just attack sound—it rewrote the world's rhythm, making every heartbeat stumble.
He clenched his teeth and whispered through the chaos. "So that's your weapon…"
The Husk Choir advanced, each step synchronized to their shared frequency. The vibration grew unbearable. Cipher's scythe hummed in response, resonating sympathetically. The blade's silver light quivered, bending like liquid.
He forced his will into it. "Resonate with me, not them."
The weapon steadied, its runes flickering. Cipher surged forward.
He swung low—clean, disciplined arcs. Each cut tore through the blurred bodies, but the wounds didn't bleed. The creatures shuddered, splintered, then reformed, their shapes rebuilding from vibration.
He couldn't kill sound with steel.
So he changed tactics.
Cipher reversed the scythe, planting its tip into the earth. He flooded it with starlight, inverting the resonance. The weapon emitted a pulse—not of sound, but of silence.The air snapped.
The Choir staggered, their screams strangled mid-note. The world itself seemed to exhale. Then, as one, they collapsed into heaps of ash and static, their outlines burning away.
Cipher swayed, dizzy. The silence that followed wasn't peace—it was suffocating emptiness. His head rang with phantom echoes.
"Auto…" he rasped.
No response.
He turned.
The Automaton hovered erratically, its core dim and sputtering. Its voice came in fragments: "—signal… fragmented—Cipher… don't… let… it—" Then only static.
He reached for it, but the world folded again.
The horizon split open like glass under strain. Cipher found himself standing at the edge of a new loop. The ground was familiar—the same cracked plain—but the sky was bleeding ink. Lightning forked in reverse, striking upward from the earth.
He realized the Choir hadn't been destroyed—they were reset.Denied Zones didn't erase enemies; they recycled them.
The first scream hit before he could brace.
Cipher roared, thrusting his free hand outward. A wave of raw magic burst from his palm, scattering the air like shrapnel. The Choir's charge faltered as light carved them apart. But they kept coming, reconstructed again and again, voices fusing into a dissonant chord.
He moved on instinct, every muscle screaming from exhaustion. The world became rhythm—cut, pivot, dodge, parry. His wounds tore open with every motion. Each swing drained more light from the scythe until its glow became a faint ember.
Still, he refused to stop.
Auto's voice flickered back to life, faint and warped. "Cipher… energy… ninety-three percent… depletion… recommend—"
"Not yet."
The Choir surrounded him, vibrating so violently the air itself warped. He drove the scythe into the ground again and shouted, voice raw, "You can deny me all you want—I am not leaving!"
He poured everything left into the weapon.
The blade ignited.
A sphere of silver light detonated, expanding outward like a heartbeat. Space buckled. The Choir disintegrated, their screams stretching into infinity before winking out. The plain shattered, fragmenting into floating shards. Cipher was suspended amid chaos—gravity meaningless, reality torn open around him.
For a moment he saw behind the world—a labyrinth of endless corridors, all leading back to the same point. He realized how small he was, how deliberate this trap had been. The Graveyard didn't need to kill him. It only needed to exhaust his hope.
He screamed back into the void and swung.
The scythe cut through space.
Reality tore.
A rift opened—blinding, white-silver light spilling from within. On the other side he glimpsed a horizon that wasn't rotted, a flicker of sky, perhaps even the edge of the Graveyard.
He reached for it.
Pain lanced through his body. His shoulder gave out. The light swallowed him whole.
When he awoke, he was lying on cold stone.
The fog was gone. The air was still, silent except for the faint crackle of residual energy fading around him. His body ached in every joint. One arm refused to move entirely; his shoulder had locked, the muscle burned out from overuse.
Auto hovered above, sparking weakly. "Cipher… signal—stable. You breached containment."
Cipher blinked up at the dim glow of the Automaton. "Where are we?"
"Unknown. But it is… outside the loop."
He pushed himself upright with his good arm, grunting with effort. The landscape around them was gray and hollow—no movement, no whispers, just silence so total it rang in his ears.
At the far end of the field stood a structure. Not the skeletal tower—something smaller, half-collapsed, built of ribs and mirrors. A gate, maybe, or a threshold.
Cipher wiped blood from his cheek, leaving a streak of crimson against pale skin. "Then that's where we're going."
Auto hesitated. "You are at critical depletion. Your starlight is nearly gone."
Cipher smiled faintly, though there was no humor in it. "Then I'll walk."
He rose, leaning on the scythe like a crutch, and started toward the distant shape. His boots left faint silver prints in the dead dust. Behind him, the air where the rift had been still shimmered faintly, trying to close.
Auto floated closer, voice softer now. "Cipher… you should not have survived that."
He didn't look back. "Wasn't planning to."
They walked on, the silence pressing around them like a coffin.
Far behind, unseen in the black void that had been the Denied Zone, something watched the faint glimmer of his departing light—and smiled.