The change wasn't violent.
When they crossed the rift, Royd first felt absence.
The constant weight on his chest—that invisible pressure that had accompanied him for years—simply vanished. It wasn't immediate relief, but a sudden disconnection, as if something that had always been there had been ripped away without warning. The air filled his lungs with an almost insulting ease. Too clean. Too soft.
Any inhaled deeply beside him and let out a shaky sigh.
Royd opened his eyes.
The rift opened atop a wide hill, covered in tall grass that swayed in the wind. From there, the world unfolded into a vast plain dotted with slender, straight pines, without a trace of deformation. They weren't twisted or marked by mutation. They were alive. Whole.
The sky wasn't blue.
It stretched above them in a pale, soft lilac, almost muted, like a memory that refused to fade. Suspended high above, a reddish sun bathed the landscape in warm, strangely familiar light. It wasn't Earth's sun… but Royd felt, without knowing why, that it was the same one he had grown up under.
"It's…" Any hesitated, "beautiful."
Royd didn't reply.
What he saw matched too closely with ancient tales. With inherited descriptions, fragments of reconstructed images, stories of a world that no longer existed. That land had once been Earth. Recognizing it hurt.
But the illusion wasn't complete.
Encircling the rift was the Black Wall.
It wasn't an ordinary wall, nor an improvised defense, but an enormous ring of dark stone and blackened metal enclosing the hill completely. From above, Royd could follow its curve until it disappeared from view, stretching like an artificial horizon that didn't belong to the landscape.
He realized then, with uncomfortable clarity, that they hadn't arrived in a new world.
What surrounded them didn't exist on its own.
It was bounded.
And by crossing the rift, they had stepped inside that boundary. The descent began in silence.
As they walked down the worn stone path, Royd noticed one of them. Near the tear, a Night Champion stood apart from the rest. His armor didn't shine; it was a matte, absolute black, the same material that absorbed light in the Black Wall. He wasn't watching the newcomers or controlling passes. His stance was that of an eternal statue, his gaze fixed on the back of the hill, toward the thickening forest where the woods began to twist. There, among the shadows, horrors lurked: beasts mutated over decades, still waiting for a chance to cross.
That Champion didn't blink. His calm was so profound it was inhuman, as if he were the only dam capable of holding back what hid beyond the rift.
Royd looked down at the ground and paused for a second. Almost no one noticed; the other travelers stepped over it with indifference, but he saw the marks. They were barely perceptible glyphs, carved into the living rock. They didn't glow, but emitted a thermal vibration Royd felt through the soles of his boots. It was an invisible barrier keeping the fragment's influence and the stubborn corrupt fauna at bay.
Those marks were the only thing separating this lilac paradise from the hell they had just escaped. Royd shivered as he realized it: Letharis was a bubble contained by an iron will.
The Night Champion turned his head slightly. His eyes met Royd's for a fraction of a second. There was no threat, only a chilling recognition, as if the warrior read through his leather armor all the scars Royd carried from "outside."
Royd looked away, squeezed Any's hand, and quickened his pace.
As they advanced, the Black Wall shifted from a distant ring to an oppressive presence. They weren't alone; lower-ranking champions and hybrids descended in the same direction, escorted by patrols that silently monitored the route. No one spoke. The silence was broken only by the hum of the wall, which seemed to absorb sound itself as they approached its base.
Finally, the path narrowed abruptly, leading them to the only exit.
The gate.
It wasn't an ordinary gate. It was a vertical opening, deep, carved into the impossible thickness of the Black Wall. From the outside, it looked like a wound in the stone. The other end wasn't visible. Only darkness.
Guarding the entrance, more Night Champions waited… and alongside them, giant birds the size of horses. Their dark feathers had metallic reflections, and their folded wings had edges sharp as blades. Their beaks were long, curved, made to tear.
But it was the eyes that unsettled.
They didn't blink.
They watched.
Not as animals, but as conscious hunters, measuring distance, intention, weakness. They weren't pets.
They were companions.
One of the Champions stepped forward.
To their surprise, he spoke in their language.
"Outsiders," he said in a deep voice. "Your crossing has been registered."
He extended his hand and gave them two thin plates of a pale metal that felt warm to the touch. The instant Royd and Any took them, filaments of light ran across the surface, filling with symbols and letters impossible to read.
"This will be your identification in Letharis," he continued. "The city will know who you are… and where you came from."
Royd took the pale metal plate, but the moment his fingers closed around it, he felt a sharp, feverish sting in his fingertip, as if an invisible stinger had pierced his skin. He let out a muffled growl, but didn't release the object. Filaments of light, the color of arterial blood, spread across the plate, filling with symbols and letters impossible to read while extracting his trace. Any let out a small cry upon feeling the same, staring at her hand in confusion.
The plates were no longer cold; they now pulsed with constant heat, synchronized with their own pulses. They weren't mere entry passes; they were invisible shackles already devouring their anonymity.
There was no welcome. The Champion didn't even wait for them to recover from the sting. With a crisp gesture of his spear, he pointed to the tunnel sinking into the heart of the stone.
"Proceed. Do not obstruct the flow."
The passage's interior was an endless throat that seemed to swallow the lilac sunlight. The Black Wall wasn't hollow: it was a solid block stretching kilometers deep, and the tunnel felt like the esophagus of a stone beast. The walls, made of material that absorbed even the echo of their breaths, made the silence deafening.
There were no torches. Light came from spheres suspended in the air, pulsing with a slow, almost biological rhythm. As Royd and Any walked, the spheres changed color as they passed, subtly rotating to follow their path.
Royd shivered. They weren't walking through a passage; they were being scanned. Every step, every racing heartbeat of Any, was being recorded by the wall. It wasn't just surveillance; it was a silent dissection.
"Don't look at the lights, Any," Royd whispered, though he couldn't escape the pressure of that artificial gaze on the back of his neck. "Just keep walking."
When darkness finally began to recede and the exit appeared as a bright point ahead, the feeling of scrutiny didn't vanish; it transformed into something vaster.
The Black Wall was behind them.
The air changed. Space opened.
Before them stretched another path, wider, better crafted, gently descending toward a walled city. Only then did he see the carriages: sturdy structures moving slowly, drawn by unknown pack animals, with broad backs and multiple legs, adapted to a world that wasn't Earth.
Below, the city rose into view.
Letharis.
Its walls were different: lower, clearer, built to protect, not contain. The comparison was inevitable. One wall enclosed what shouldn't exist. The other safeguarded those who had a place in this world.
Ancient stone towers blended with impossibly designed structures, rising under the lilac sky.
Any gripped her identification tightly.
"We're not from here," she whispered.
Royd nodded, still feeling the strange lightness in his body.
"Not yet."
He looked one last time at the Black Wall… and then at the city.
They had been admitted.
Not accepted.
And in a place so carefully built, being a stranger always came with a price.