The black water was no longer boiling; it was exploding. Columns of acidic liquid shot toward the cavern ceiling like geysers, falling back in a corrosive rain that sizzled against armour and stone. The obsidian island was shattering beneath the company's feet, shards sinking into the churning lake.
"Don't just stand there!" Geneviève yelled, shoving Tristan toward the edge of the island where the water was shallower. "To the north shore! There's an opening in the wall!"
As they ran, leaping between rock plates that tilted precariously, the mountain of water at thecentrer of the lake collapsed, revealing the horror hiding within.
It was not a toad, nor a fish, nor a worm. It was the blasphemous union of all three. Gulgaz was a mass of dark green, gelatinous flesh the size of a two-story house. It had no eyes, only sensory pits that vibrated as they sensed movement. Its mouth was not a jaw, but a circular sucker bristling with concentric rows of hooked teeth, wide enough to swallow a horse whole. On its back, hundreds of pustules throbbed, releasing clouds of poisonous gas.
The beast emitted a sound—a wet, piercing SCREEEE—that felt as if it would burst their eardrums. Then, it lunged forward. It did not swim; it dragged itself across the shallow bottom with stubby, webbed limbs, generating a tidal wave that slammed into the company.
"Hold on!" Gaston shouted, gripping a rocky outcropping as the black wave hit them. The acidic water burned exposed skin, but their armour and elven cloaks offered a modicum of protection. When the wave passed, they were drenched and disoriented, scattered across a narrow tongue of gravel bordering the cavern wall.
They were grounded, but the beast was fast. From Gulgaz's circular sucker, something pink and slimy shot out, fast as a whiplash. A tongue. Twenty meters long, covered in adhesive mucus and poisonous barbs.
It aimed for the elf, Lothar. Lothar saw it coming andleaptd laterally with superhuman reflexes, losing an arrow mid-flight. The arrow sank into the tongue, but the flaccid flesh absorbed it without harm. The tongue struck the rock wall where Lothar had been an instant before, shattering the stone.
Retracting, the appendage intercepted Tristan. It coiled around the boy's leg. "Ahhh!" Tristan screamed as he was violently dragged toward the lake, toward the open mouth full of rotating teeth.
"Tristan!" Geneviève did not run; she sprinted using the Step of the Wind. She ignored the gravel sliding beneath her boots. She reached the midpoint between the boy and the water. She did not try to grab Tristan—the monster's pulling force would have surely dislocated the boy's hip. She leapt onto the tongue, which was pulled taut as a violin string. She raised Vespers' Light.
"Let go!"
She brought the sword down with the full weight of her body and soul. The sacred blade sheared through the demonic flesh. The monster's blood sprayed everywhere—a black, stinking liquid that burned like Greek fire. Gulgaz roared in agony, retracting the stump of its tongue into its mouth, while Tristan rolled onto the gravel, free but terrified.
"Don't stop!" Geneviève ordered, helping Tristan up. "It's wounded, not dead!"
The monster, furious at the mutilation, changed tactics. The pustules on its back contracted violently. PFFT. PFFT. PFFT. Projectiles of explosive biomass were launched into the air like mortar fire. They landed on the shore, exploding into clouds of corrosive gas and living leeches that sought to latch onto their boots.
"Elara! A way out!" Gaston coughed, crushing a leech the size of a cat with the butt of his crossbow. The elf pointed to a spot high on the rock wall, about ten meters above the lake level. There was a rusted iron grate, wrenched outward. A drainage duct. "Up there! It's the only exit!"
"It's too high!" Tristan cried. The wall was smooth and slick.
Geneviève looked at the wall, then at the monster charging again, preparing to crush them against the rock with its massive body. "Gaston! Do you still have that grappling hook?"
"Yes, but..."
"Fire it at the grate! Now!"
Gaston loaded the bolt with the hook into his crossbow. He taimedwith his one eye, hands trembling with adrenaline. TWANG. The hook flew, trailing the silk rope. It caught on the bars of the grate. It held.
"Elves, go first and cover us!" Geneviève ordered. Lothar and Elara scaled the rope with the speed of spiders. Reaching the top, they began to pepper Gulgaz's sensory pits with arrows to distract it.
"Tristan, go!" The boy began to climb. But he was tired, wounded. He moved slowly. The monster was ten meters away. The stench of its breath was unbearable. Gulgaz reared up on its hind limbs, ready to slam down onto the shore and flatten Geneviève and Gaston.
"Maiden!" Gaston yelled. "There isn't time for both of us!"
"Climb, you stubborn old man!" Geneviève grabbed the sergeant by his belt and hoisted him up, shoving him toward the rope just as Tristan reached the top.
Gaston began to climb. Geneviève stood alone on the narrow shore. The Leviathan loomed over her, a mountain of jelly and teeth that blotted out the "light" of the cavern. Geneviève did not recoil. She planted her feet in the gravel. She held her shield before her, angled at forty-five degrees. "Come and get me, you ugly bastard."
Gulgaz dropped. Tons of flesh hit the shore. The impact was seismic. The rock beneath Geneviève shattered. But she was not crushed. She had timed it perfectly. A second before impact, Geneviève leapt toward the monster, not away from it. She used the creature's slimy belly as a springboard, running vertically for two steps across its slippery skin, utilising the beast's own momentum.
She reached the height of the creature's snout. Gulgaz opened its mouth to swallow her mid-air. Geneviève unclipped a flask of Alchemical Fire (stolen from Gaston before they left) from her belt and hurled it into the open throat. Then, she kicked off using the monster's jaw as a foothold.
She flew backwards toward the rock wall. She grabbed the rope mid-height, sliding for a meter and burning her gloves, but breaking her fall.
BOOM. The flask exploded in the monster's stomach. It did not kill it—Gulgaz was too vast—but it caused an explosive indigestion. The beast vomited flames and black bile, writhing and rolling back into the water to extinguish the internal fire.
Geneviève scrambled up the last few meters. Gaston and Tristan's hands grabbed her and pulled her into the drainage duct just as a blind tentacle struck the grate, bending it.
They collapsed onto the damp floor of the tunnel. They were in darkness, save for the light of Geneviève's sword. The tunnel was narrow, circular, and smelled of ancient sewage. From outside came the furious, gurgling screams of Gulgaz.
"Are we... alive?" Tristan panted, lying on his back.
Geneviève took off her helm to spit out some blood; she had bitten her tongue in the impact. "For now," she said, looking at the tunnel as it delved deeper, sloping downward. "But we're heading down the drain. And you know what's found at the end of drains."
Gaston laughed, a hysterical sound. "Shit. A lot of shit."
"No," Elara corrected, cleaning her bow. "The heart of the sickness. The Spring."
Geneviève put her helm back on. The blue light illuminated the dark pipe. "On your feet. If we stay here, that thing might decide to suck us out like snails from a shell. Let's move."
The slide through the drainage pipe ended not with a splash into water, but with a fall into the void. One after another, Geneviève and her companions were spat out of the rusted opening, landing on a soft, spongy slope covered in luminescent moss.
They stood up, wiping the slime from their gear, and looked up. They were breathless. The pipe had deposited them onto a natural ledge overlooking a subterranean cavity of inconceivable proportions. It was no mere cave; it was a titanic Geode, as vast as the entire city of Carcassonne, hidden within the deepest roots of the Grey Mountains.
"By the Lady..." Tristan whispered, his voice trembling not with fear, but with a near-religious awe. "Are we beneath the world?"
The immense void was not dark. The walls and the vault of the cavern, miles away, were encrusted with amethyst and quartz crystals as large as siege towers. These crystals pulsed with a light of their own—a deep, melancholy violet that bathed the landscape below in an eternal twilight. Colossal stalactites hung from the ceiling, constantly dripping an iridescent liquid. The drops fell for hundreds of meters, shattering into a fine, shimmering rain that filled the air with distorted rainbows.
But the beauty was a lie. "Do not look too long at the crystals," Elara warned, shielding her eyes with her hand. "The light... it is wrong. These crystals amplify magic. Once, they sang the harmony of the earth. Now, they scream."
Geneviève closed her physical eyes and opened her mind. She was right. The hum filling the cavern was not the sound of wind, but a psychic vibration of pure pain. The earth here was suffering—an open wound that could not scar over.
To reach thecentrer of the Geode, where a pillar of sickly green light indicated the location of the Spring, they had to cross the valley below. It was not empty. It was occupied by a Forest of Stone. Thousands of stalagmites rose from the ground, but the corruption had moulded them into grotesque organic shapes. They looked like petrified trees, with branches of crystal sharp as razors and leaves of translucent mineral.
They descended the mossy slope in silence. Walking through the Forest of Stone was like moving through a fever dream. The ground was covered in a fine dust similar to snow, yet warm to the touch. "Watch where you step," Gaston said, pointing to a crystalline formation. "That stuff cuts through leather like paper."
As they advanced, Geneviève noticed something. Some of the "stalagmites" had forms that were far too familiar. She approached one of them. It was two meters tall, shaped like a man kneeling, his hands clasped in prayer. The crystal had engulfed him, growing over his skin, turning his flesh to quartz but preserving the expression of terror and devotion on his face.
"Monks," Geneviève said, gently touching the statue's stone shoulder. "These were the original guardians."
"They petrified themselves," Lothar deduced, a analysingthe faded runes on the stone robes. "They used a desperate rite. They tried to become a living wall to contain the corruption when the portal opened. They failed, but their sacrifice slowed the end."
Tristan looked at the hundreds of statues scattered across the violet valley. An army of crystal martyrs. "Do you think they can hear us?" the boy asked.
"I hope not," Gaston replied grimly. "Being conscious inside a rock for a hundred years? Better to be in hell."
They pressed on for hours. Perception of time was distorted in that place. Physical fatigue was crushing, but the adrenaline and ambient magic kept them awake in a state of hyper-alertness. They arrived at a crevasse that split the Geode in half. At the bottom of the crevasse flowed a river of green magma—not lava, but pure Chaos energy, liquid Warpstone, flowing toward the centre of the earth.
The only way to cross was a natural bridge: a single, immense shard of crystal that had fallen from the ceiling millennia before, connecting the two banks. The bridge was translucent. As they walked across, they could see the green river rushing a hundred meters beneath their boots.
Midway across the bridge, the crystal began to sing. A high-pitched resonance. Geneviève's armour began to vibrate in sympathy. Vespers' Light hummed furiously in its scabbard.
"Run!" Geneviève ordered, sensing the frequency becoming destructive. "The bridge is reacting to my aura!"
They ran. The crystal beneath their feet began to crack, drawing white spiderwebs across the smooth surface. The sound became unbearable—a whistle that made their noses bleed. Tristan stumbled. Gaston grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and literally threw him onto the opposite bank, leaping immediately after. Geneviève and the elves arrived an instant later, just as a section of the bridge behind them exploded into diamond dust, plummeting into the green river.
They collapsed on the far bank, panting, as the "song" of the dying bridge faded. "This place..." Geneviève gasped, removing her helm to breathe the air that tasted of ozone and rotten flowers. "This place hates everything orderly. It hates iron. It hates form."
They stood and looked ahead. The crystal forest ended. Before them, the ground sloped gently upward toward a vast circular plateau at the exact centre of the Geode. And there, they saw the Source.
It was not a fountain. It was not a well. It was a Heart. An organic and mineral structure as large as a castle, pulsing rhythmically. Arteries of black rock branched out from it, pumping corrupted liquid into the ground. Around the Heart, the air was solid—a mist of pestilence so dense it looked like a rampart. And guarding the Heart stood motionless figures. Not screaming monsters, but silent sentinels in ancient, rusted armour.
"There," Elara said, pointing to the Heart with a trembling hand. "There is where the world dies."
Geneviève replaced her helm. The Clang sounded small and insignificant in that immensity. But the light in her eyes ignited stronger than ever, a blue star in a violet universe. "Then let us go and revive it," she said. "Or stop the heartbeat forever."
They began the walk toward the plateau. There were no more hiding places. No more tricks. Only the final ascent toward the origin of evil.