Time did not pass in the Obsidian Jaggeds. It accumulated.
It gathered like dust in the creases of Kaelen's heavy leather coat. It settled in the dry, cracking joints of the Strider-beasts. The wagon moved, but the horizon did not seem to get any closer. The twisted cathedral of Saint Icarus remained fixed in their peripheral vision for hours, a mockery of progress, as if the land itself was stretching out to keep them trapped in its glass teeth.
Kaelen sat on the bench, his body rigid. He was counting the rotations of the front left wheel.
Four thousand, three hundred and twelve.
Four thousand, three hundred and thirteen.
It was a meaningless metric. The Audit did not care about wheel rotations. It cared about the axle, which was vibrating at a frequency that suggested a microscopic fracture in the iron. It cared about the water barrels, where the evaporation rate had increased by 0.4% due to the rising ambient heat.
But Kaelen counted the wheels because if he stopped counting, he would have to listen to the thoughts in his own head. And in this place, the barrier between "thought" and "reality" was paper-thin.
"Stop," Elara whispered.
It wasn't a request. It was a statement of fact.
Kaelen didn't ask why. He pulled the reins immediately. The Strider-beasts halted, their massive, scaled flanks heaving. They didn't hiss. They didn't stomp. They froze, their reptilian instincts overriding their exhaustion. They lowered their heads to the black glass, turning themselves into statues.
"Engine off," Kaelen signaled to Korgath with a hand motion.
Korgath, walking beside the wagon, reached up to his chest. He turned a brass valve. The rhythmic hiss-click of his ventilator slowed, then stopped. The Orc stood perfectly still, his body locked in a pose of rusted endurance. He was holding his breath. He could do this for four minutes before the carbon dioxide buildup in his blood began to rot his brain.
"Vanya," Kaelen breathed.
The elf was already curled into a ball on the floor of the wagon. She had pulled the lead-threaded blanket over her head. Her hands were pressed over her ears, but blood was already trickling from beneath her fingernails.
"It is vast," she whimpered, her voice muffled by the wool. "It is so heavy."
Kaelen felt it then.
It wasn't a sound. It was the death of sound.
The howling wind of the Rustlands, which had been their constant companion for two days, simply ceased. The grit stopped hitting the wagon. The air became still, but it wasn't peaceful. It was the stillness of a vacuum before the seal breaks.
The light changed. The dull purple of the sky didn't darken; it flattened. The shadows of the jagged glass shards around them stopped pointing away from the light source. They began to point toward something in the north.
Something was coming.
Kaelen slowly, infinitesimally, reached for the tarp of void-hide he kept under the seat. He draped it over Elara and himself.
"Do not look," he whispered into her ear. "Do not speak. Do not think loud thoughts."
They sat in the darkness of the tarp, smelling of old oil and fear.
Kaelen triggered his Audit. He couldn't help it. It was a reflex. He tried to calculate the threat.
Threat Assessment: Error. Magical Density: Infinite. Structural Integrity of Reality: 12%... 8%... 4%...
The numbers in his mind weren't red. They were black. They weren't warning him of danger; they were informing him of his own irrelevance.
Through a tear in the tarp, Kaelen watched the patch of obsidian ground beside the wagon.
The ground began to sing.
It was a high, crystalline vibration. The black glass shards started to levitate. Tiny pebbles floated up into the air, suspended by a gravitational field that had nothing to do with the planet.
Then, the shadow fell.
It did not pass quickly. It was a slow, majestic eclipse. It blocked out the Dead Stars. It blocked out the purple haze.
Kaelen saw the leg of the Strider-beast nearest to him. The lizard was trembling, a microscopic shudder in its muscles. The beast was terrified, but it didn't run. It knew, with an ancient biological imperative, that to run was to be seen. And to be seen was to be unmade.
Above them, something moved.
It was not walking on the ground. It was walking on the Ley Lines, swimming through the air as if it were water.
Kaelen caught a glimpse of it through the tear.
It was not a dragon. It was not a demon. It was a Null-Walker.
It looked like a cloud of geometry—a shifting, rotating mass of angles and curves that the human eye could not resolve. It was made of oil and starlight. Where it passed, the world simply... forgot to be. The obsidian shards didn't break; they dissolved into grey mist, then reformed wrong.
The pressure in Kaelen's skull was agonizing. It felt like a thumb pressing into the soft spot of a newborn's head.
Don't look. Don't look. Don't look.
Beside him, Elara gasped.
It was a tiny sound. A release of air.
To Kaelen, it sounded like a cannon blast.
The floating pebbles froze in mid-air.
The shadow stopped moving.
Time stretched. A second became an hour. Kaelen's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. Thump-thump-thump. It was too loud. The Walker would hear his blood.
He clamped his hand over Elara's mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut. He forced his mind to go blank. He visualized a wall of grey stone. Nothing here. Just rock. Just rust. No life. No soul. Nothing to eat.
He felt the attention of the entity shift. It was like a spotlight beam sweeping over them. It felt cold—an absolute zero that burned the skin. It swept over the wagon. It lingered on Korgath.
Kaelen counted the seconds since Korgath stopped his lungs.
One hundred and eighty. Three minutes.
The Orc was suffocating. Standing there, upright, dying by inches to keep the silence.
The spotlight moved. It passed over the wagon. It probed the canvas. Kaelen felt the fabric stiffen as the entity's gaze tested the molecular bonds of the weave.
Elara was shaking. She wasn't scared. Kaelen realized with a jolt of horror that she wasn't trembling from fear. She was vibrating. She was resonating.
The entity was a frequency. And she was a tuning fork.
She wanted to sing back.
Kaelen pressed her head into his chest, muffling her, holding her tight enough to bruise. No, he projected the thought with everything he had. Stay silent. Stay small.
The shadow lingered for an eternity.
And then, slowly, the pebbles began to drop.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
The gravity returned. The oppressive weight of the Dead Stars reasserted itself.
The shadow drifted south, toward the ruins of the cathedral. It moved with the slow, inevitable drift of a glacier.
Kaelen waited.
He waited until the shadow was gone. He waited until the purple light returned. He waited until the wind began to howl again, throwing grit against the wheels.
Only then did he pull the tarp off.
"Korgath," Kaelen croaked.
The Orc fell.
He didn't crumple; he tipped over like a felled tree, slamming into the obsidian ground with a crash that would have killed them a minute ago.
Kaelen scrambled down from the wagon. He reached Korgath's chest. The Orc's face, visible through the foggy glass of his mask, was blue. His eyes were rolled back.
"Breathe, you stubborn bastard," Kaelen hissed. He wrenched the brass valve open.
HISS-WHIRRRRR.
The machine kicked in. The bellows expanded, sucking in the toxic air, forcing it into the Orc's ruined chest.
Korgath's body arched. He took a jagged, desperate gasp, coughing up black phlegm inside the mask.
"Alive," Korgath wheezed. "Still... rigid."
Kaelen sat back on his heels in the dirt. His hands were shaking. He looked at his Audit.
Korgath: Hypoxic damage. Cognitive function reduced by 15%. Vanya: Catatonic. Psychic bleeding. Elara: Resonant.
He looked up at the wagon. Elara was sitting there, staring at the direction the entity had gone. She looked disappointed.
"It was lonely," she whispered.
Kaelen climbed back up. He grabbed her shoulders. He shook her, hard.
"It wasn't lonely," he snarled, his voice cracking. "It was a Herald. If it had found us, it wouldn't have killed us. It would have erased us. Do you understand? There would be no bodies to bury. No memory of us. We would just... never have been."
Elara looked at him. Her eyes were older than the ruin they had passed.
"I know," she said. "That's why it's lonely. It can't touch anything without breaking it."
Kaelen let her go. He felt sick. He felt the profound, crushing insignificance of their existence. They were ants crawling across a burning anvil, hoping the hammer didn't notice them.
He checked the Strider-beasts. They were foaming at the mouth, their eyes wide with terror, but they were alive.
"We move," Kaelen said. His voice was hollow. "We move now."
"Vanya?" Korgath asked, pulling himself up using the wagon wheel for support.
"Leave her in the blanket," Kaelen said. "She needs to rebuild her mental walls. If she wakes up now, she'll scream."
They started the wagon moving again.
The wheels crunched over the obsidian. The sound was comforting now. It was a human sound. A mechanical sound.
Kaelen opened his ledger. He stared at the blank page.
He tried to write an entry. Encountered Null-Walker. Survived.
But he couldn't hold the charcoal stick steady. He dropped it. It rolled off the bench and fell onto the black glass road, left behind in the dust.
He didn't pick it up. He just stared at the horizon, where the Great Severance waited.
They had survived the monster. But Kaelen knew, with a certainty that bypassed his Audit, that something inside them had not. They had looked at the Infinite, and they had flinched.
And the Infinite would remember that.