The sound cut out as suddenly as it had begun.
Riven froze, puzzled by the sudden silence. He tried to listen again but there was nothing. Not even the wind dared stir. He exhaled shakily, trying to steady his chest. 'Whatever that was, maybe it filled itself on the Deviant it devoured… maybe it just went back to sleep.'
The rock beneath his palm shivered.
Thud.
His eyes snapped downward, then along the cliff face as another strike reverberated, deeper this time, humming through his bones. A shiver crawled up his spine.
"The hell…?" he whispered, rising to his feet. His hand fumbled for the stinger staff slung across from him. Pain lanced up his arm as he glanced at his two broken fingers. He hissed, grit his teeth, and snapped them back into place. The pain was unbearable, but he bit it down, breath ragged and thoughts were cut short by the growing rhythm.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Something big was moving within the gorge walls. Against his own instinct, pulled by some dreadful magnetism, Riven peered back over the edge.
And from the depths, he saw something.
The shadows gave way to its form, illuminated in part by its sheer ascent. It dwarfed the lizard-insect he had fought earlier. Its colossal frame resembled that's of a bear only in the vaguest silhouette. Its forelimbs were not claws but hooked keratin blades, curved like siege hooks to gouge into stone. Black shale-like armor plates glistened across its hide, broken by ragged tufts of coarse fur. Its eyes reflected no light, yet locked directly onto him.
The beast's jaw cracked wide, and its roar shattered the silence once more tearing through his chest like raking talons. Riven staggered back, the staff trembled in his hands as fear surged like molten bile, hotter and sharper than anything he had ever known.
A Tier one Aberrant.
His legs buckled as he scrambled backward, both hands and feet slipping on the stone. His thoughts spiraled, frantic and poisonous:
'I'm going to die here. I'm going to die here. I'm going to die here'
He lunged toward the cave mouth, scooping up the pickaxe he had abandoned. He ran and didn't look back. The opening before him was wide and too precise to be natural. It did not have the jagged bite of erosion. It almost looked…
'As if carved by hands.'
The thought barely formed before a faint pulse of light rippled across the stone. A soft glow brushed his vision, then died. He blinked hard, heart still hammering in his chest, but the tunnel gaped on ahead, straight and deep.
He pressed forward with his steps echoing into the suffocating dark. The farther he walked, the larger the passage grew. Stone bent overhead, arching almost like bones. At intervals, faint shimmers of light would pulse from the end of the tunnel and across the walls like one of those stories about dying stars.
Minutes bled into nearly half an hour. Sweat streaked his face as his body screamed with fatigue, but stopping wasn't an option because behind him, the gorge would soon give birth to a monster.
And as if on cue.
A roar came, echoing through the tunnel like a wave of death.
Riven's skin iced over. 'Shit, It's almost out of the gorge.'
The light pulsed again and it was blinding this time as he got close to the end of the tunnel. He stumbled forward, raising an arm against it. When his vision cleared, the tunnel had come to an end.
The passage opened into a vast clearing, a chamber hollowed as if from the ribcage of a fallen titan or something. Titanic boulders littered the ground, scattered like broken teeths. Jagged walls stretched high, carved and etched with glyphs so old they looked like they'd been chewed away by time itself.
His awe lasted all of two breaths.
Another roar thundered from the tunnel behind him. Just as the chamber lit up again and this time the source was from the center of the chamber.
Riven's gaze snapped to it.
Suspended in the middle of the hollow room, was a massive stone structure hung impossibly in the air. Pillars of rock tethered to it like a structural support beams. He moved around the chamber looking up at it and then Riven saw something. One side of it had cracked wide open, and from that wound spilled a storm of colors red, silver, blue, black swirling in chaotic rhythm.
And yet, amid the chaos, one light stood apart. A dull, sickly green pulse, threaded with streaks of black. It felt stronger even though it was dull.
Riven staggered while staring at it in growing dread and bewilderment.
"What… the hell is that…?"
This wasn't a corridor as he'd hoped. This wasn't the escape he'd prayed for.
It was something else.
He swallowed hard, his throat felt dry, his voice breaking into the still air.
"…I'm screwed, aren't I?"
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