The silence here was not that of emptiness, but that of a tomb holding its breath. Every step I took on the ivory sand produced a crystalline sound, a sharp crunch that echoed off the invisible walls of the abyss. My obsidian feet sank slightly into the bone dust, leaving behind black, indelible footprints, like ink stains on immaculate parchment.
I walked. For how long? The very notion of time had dissolved in the waters of the Styx. Here, beneath the river, time did not pass, it accumulated.
I wandered among structures that defied reason. Limestone pillars the size of skyscrapers soared toward the ceiling of darkness, sculpted by millennia of currents. Sometimes I passed colossal rib cages, the remains of mythical beasts whose names had been forgotten even by the gods, forming natural arches under which I had to crawl. This desert was the dumping ground of creation, the place where everything too heavy for the soul ended up.
My new obsidian skin vibrated. It was not a tremor of fear, but a resonance. Something far ahead was beating at the same rhythm as my stone heart.
This attraction was not visual. It was a magnetic pull, an invisible cord tied around my essence, drawing me to the north of this void. The further I went, the clearer the image of the red lycoris became. The flower no longer floated only in my mind; it now seemed to pulsate in the air, a trail of scarlet pollen that only I could see through the phosphorescent mist.
Suddenly, I stopped.
The desert was changing. The white bone sand gave way to slabs of black stone, arranged in concentric circles. At the center of this giant arrangement, bone dust swirled, stirred by a wind that did not exist. There, on the horizon of my vision, a golden glow, almost imperceptible, pierced the darkness. It was a light different from the green phosphorescence of the Styx. It was a warm, ancient, and terribly dangerous light.
Every step toward this source cost me. My obsidian body became heavier, denser. The pressure increased, no longer that of the water, but that of a presence.
"You're not supposed to be here," whispered a voice.
The sound did not come from the ruins, but from the air itself. It was a multiple voice, made up of a thousand overlapping echoes. I did not stop. The pull was too strong. My "Anomaly" instinct screamed at me that what awaited me there was the reason for my survival. It was the forge that would give meaning to my crime.
I passed one last dune of bones and stood petrified. There, floating above a broken basalt altar, was a crack in reality. A shard of golden crystal, slowly spinning, giving off an aura of power that made the ground around it crack.
The Fragment of Chronos.
The moment my eyes fell upon it, my memory spasmed. For the first time, I saw not only the red flower. I saw a face. A face I had loved, or perhaps a face I had destroyed. The golden shard called me by a name I was not yet entitled to bear.