The view from the precipice was a masterpiece of desolation. The Sinking Grades were not merely a ruin; they were a scar in the fabric of reality, and the pulsing spire at its heart was the source of the infection. There was no clear path down, only a chaotic jumble of floating debris and the hanging remnants of a dead city.
"How do we get down there?" James asked, his voice swallowed by the immense cavern.
Nyx didn't answer. She simply walked to the edge, her glowing eyes scanning the abyss below. She pointed to a large, floating chunk of what looked like a shattered fountain, hovering a hundred feet down and a good fifty feet out. It was an impossible jump.
"The air is heavy here," her whispers chimed, offering this as a complete explanation. "It will hold you. Jump."
Before James could argue, she leaped. She didn't plummet. She fell with a strange, dreamlike slowness, as if descending through water, landing silently on the target platform. She turned and looked up at him, waiting.
Clutching Sophia, whose life felt impossibly fragile against the yawning void, James's heart hammered. This city had its own rules, and his survival depended on learning them, fast. He took a breath, closed his eyes, and jumped.
The sensation was sickening. It felt like plunging into thick, invisible syrup. The air resisted his fall, slowing him, buffering him. He landed on the floating rock with a jarring thud that was far gentler than it should have been. He had trusted the city's madness, and it had held him.
Their descent was a series of these terrifying, logic-defying leaps. Nyx was their guide, her instincts perfectly attuned to the broken physics of her home. "Not there," she'd chime, pointing to a patch of air that shimmered. "Light air. It will not catch you." Or, "Step only on the dark stones; the glowing ones remember being fire."
James began to understand. The Sinking Grades were not just physically broken; their very concepts were shattered. It was a place held together by the lingering memories of what it once was, where metaphors could become lethal truths.
They were crossing a colossal, fallen bridge that spanned a chasm of pure blackness when Nyx suddenly stopped, holding out a hand. "Wait. The air is tearing."
James looked ahead and saw it: a faint, vertical line of distortion cutting across the bridge, like a heat haze on a summer road. It moved slowly, a silent, invisible wall of force.
"Gravity shear," Nyx's whispers explained. "Here, down is down. There," she nodded to the other side of the line, "down is… that way." She pointed horizontally, towards the distant cavern wall.
Crossing at the wrong moment would mean being flung sideways into the abyss. They waited, muscles tense, as the shimmering line drifted past them. The moment it was gone, they sprinted across the rest of the bridge, the unsettling feeling of being pulled in two directions fading as they reached solid ground.
It was then that James felt a change in Sophia. Her shivering intensified, and a soft, purple light began to emanate from the stone-grey skin of her cursed hand, pulsing in time with the distant spire.
"Nyx, look," he said, his voice tight with panic.
Nyx's glowing eyes widened. "The spire calls to its own song," she chimed. The curse, dormant for so long, was accelerating, resonating with its powerful source. Sophia was now a beacon, broadcasting their presence to whatever lurked in this desolate place. Their time was running out.
As they pressed on, the ruins became more defined. James passed under a crumbling archway and froze. For a split second, the scene changed. The ruin was replaced by a vibrant, bustling market. He saw people in archaic, colorful clothes laughing, trading goods, their faces full of life. There was no shimmer of magic, no glowing-eyed Weavers—just ordinary people. The vision vanished as quickly as it came, leaving only the dust and silence.
An echo. A memory trapped in the broken Pattern. This was the city that had been sacrificed to build Luminar, a world of men replaced by a world of mages.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of careful navigation, they reached the base of the central spire. Up close, it was a monolith of smooth, black, crystalline material that seemed to absorb the cavern's faint light. There were no doors, no windows, no seams. It was a perfect, impenetrable needle of stone.
"How do we get in?" James asked.
"Walls are thin, if you know how to listen," Nyx whispered, approaching the spire's base. She reached out a hand, intending to feel for a weakness in its Pattern.
The moment her fingers came within a foot of the surface, the spire responded.
With a deep, resonant hum that vibrated in James's bones, glowing violet symbols flared to life across the black stone, racing up the tower in intricate, web-like patterns. It was a ward, a defensive matrix of immense power. And the symbols, the very magical signature, were made of the same sickening, dissonant energy as the curse.
Nyx snatched her hand back with a sharp cry, smoke curling from her fingertips as if she'd touched a hot iron. She stared at the now-glowing tower, her usual calm shattered, replaced by a raw, primal fear James had never seen in her.
"It is awake," her whispers hissed, no longer a melodic chime but a frantic, terrified sound. "The song knows we are here. It's listening."
The dormant power they had been tracking was no longer passive. It was a conscious, aware intelligence. And they had just announced their arrival on its doorstep.