The aftershock of a Null-Walker was not sound; it was a profound, ringing absence.
For three miles, the iron-banded wheels of the wagon did not roll so much as slide, struggling for purchase on obsidian that had been slicked by a layer of rapid-onset frost. The air inside the canyon—a jagged throat of black glass known as the Razor's Edge—tasted of ozone and sterilized metal, sharp enough to coat the back of the throat with the flavor of a thunderstorm that refused to break.
Kaelen halted the Strider-beasts not because they were tired, but because the front axle was singing. A hairline fracture, invisible to the naked eye but screamingly loud to his Audit, had appeared in the iron.
"Halt," Kaelen rasped. His voice sounded thin, as if the air itself had been thinned by the creature's passing.
The wagon lurched to a standstill. The beasts lowered their heads, their scales dull and grey in the twilight. They didn't hiss. They didn't forage. They stood like statues, terrified that even the expansion of their lungs might attract the attention of the thing that had just drifted by.
Kaelen climbed down. His boots hit the ground, but he didn't feel the impact. His nervous system was still vibrating, trying to process the proximity of an entity that defied the laws of creation.
"Dampen the mechanism," he signaled to Korgath.
The Orc nodded. He reached for his chest valve, turning the brass wheel with a gloved hand. The wet hiss-click of his ventilator slowed to a rhythmic, conserving thump—like a clock winding down. Korgath slumped against the wagon wheel, his massive hammer slipping from his grip to clang softly against the glass road.
"We are not unmade," Korgath rumbled, his voice sounding like grinding millstones. "Why are we not unmade?"
"It wasn't hunting," Kaelen muttered, crouching to inspect the axle. He ran a gloved hand over the cold iron, feeling the vibration of the stress fracture. "Or we were too small to be a meal. Hand me the resin."
Elara sat on the driver's bench, staring back the way they had come. The purple haze of the sky was bruising darker, turning the color of an old hematoma. She held the obsidian dagger in her lap, her knuckles white as bone.
"It felt like falling," she whispered.
Kaelen paused, the tin of void-resin in his hand. He looked up at her. "What did?"
"The shadow," she said, her eyes unfocused, fixed on the middle distance. "When it went over us. It didn't feel like a monster. A wolf feels like... anger. A spider feels like hunger. That thing... it felt like falling. Forever."
Vanya emerged from the back of the wagon. She looked wretched. The elf had tied a strip of linen around her eyes, blinding herself voluntarily to shut out the visual trauma. Blood had dried in dark crusts beneath her nose. She moved by touch, her fingers trailing along the wood of the wagon until she found the water barrel.
"That is because it has no spirit, child," Vanya said, her voice thin and brittle as dried parchment. "A wolf has a soul. Even a demon has a desire. The Walker is just... a hole in the tapestry. A place where the weaver ran out of thread."
"Fix the wheel," Kaelen ordered, though his voice lacked its usual bite. He applied the resin to the fracture, watching the alchemical paste bubble as it hardened, sealing the iron scar. "We don't have time for philosophy. The temperature is dropping. If we don't reach the shelter of the overhang in two glasses, the fluid in the beasts' eyes will freeze."
But Elara didn't move. She turned the dagger over in her hands, watching the dim light refract through the volcanic glass.
"Why didn't the world fight back?" she asked.
Kaelen stopped scrubbing. He looked at Korgath, who was staring at the ground, tracing a pattern in the ash with a thick finger.
"There is no world left to fight, little one," Korgath said softly.
"But in the stories," Elara pressed, a desperate edge entering her voice. "The Paladins. The Clerics. You said they could call down pillars of fire. You said they could burn away the shadows just by speaking a Holy Word. If that thing is just a shadow, why didn't a Paladin stop it?"
Kaelen stood up, wiping his hands on a rag. The resin smelled of pine pitch and sulfur.
"Because the bridge is burned, Elara," Kaelen said flatly.
He walked to the fire-pit they were hastily assembling—a small chemical burner shielded by slabs of slate to hide the light. He sat down, the exhaustion finally hitting him like a physical blow, a weight settling in the marrow of his bones.
"Sit," he commanded.
Elara climbed down and sat on a crate. Vanya leaned against the wheel, her blindfolded face turned toward the heat of the burner.
"You want to know why there are no Paladins?" Kaelen asked. He pulled his ledger from his coat pocket. The leather cover was scarred and stained with oil and blood. He opened it to a blank page. "Because being a Paladin wasn't a skill. It was a contract."
He drew a circle on the page with a piece of charcoal.
"This is a God," he said. "The Source. An eternal flame. A well that never runs dry."
He drew a line connecting the circle to a stick figure.
"This is a Paladin. The Paladin didn't have magic of his own. He was a vessel. A mirror. He swore an Oath—a covenant. 'I will be brave, I will be just, and in exchange, you reflect your light through me.' A simple transaction."
Kaelen struck the charcoal through the circle, crossing it out violently. The tip of the stick snapped.
"Then the well dried up," he said. "The Gods didn't just leave, Elara. They died. They rotted in the sky. And when the source dies, the connection doesn't just sever. It implodes."
Vanya shuddered. She pulled her cloak tighter around her thin shoulders. "I was there," she whispered. "In the Temple of the Silver Flame. The moment the Severance happened."
Elara looked at the elf, wide-eyed. "What... what did it look like?"
"It didn't look like anything," Vanya said, her voice trembling. "It sounded like a scream. Not from a person. From the air itself. Every priest in the temple fell to their knees. They weren't praying. They were clawing at their own chests because the light they had held inside them for a lifetime was suddenly ripped out. It left a vacuum."
Vanya touched her chest, right over her heart.
"Most died of shock. Their hearts simply stopped beating because they had forgotten how to beat without the rhythm of their God. Those who survived... they went mad. Imagine being blind your whole life, then seeing for one second, and then having your eyes gouged out. That is what happened to the Paladins. The silence broke them."
"So there's nobody?" Elara asked, looking up at the oppressive darkness of the sky. "Nobody listening to the prayers?"
"Oh, something is listening," Kaelen said, his voice grim. "That's the problem."
He pointed his thumb toward the north, back the way they had come, toward the lingering chill of the Walker.
"The Void listens. But it doesn't want your Oaths. It doesn't care if you're good or just. It only cares about mass. It wants to eat."
"The Cultists," Elara said, remembering the city. "The ones in the black robes. The Void-Touched. They have power."
"They have leverage," Kaelen corrected. "It's a different kind of transaction. A Paladin served a King. A Cultist bargains with a starving wolf."
He leaned forward, the blue light of the burner casting deep shadows in the hollows of his eyes, making his face look like a skull.
"The Void-Touched—the Flesh-Masons, the Geometers—they figured out that if the ship is sinking, the ocean will spare you if you help it drown the others. They offer up pieces of themselves. A finger. A memory. Their sanity. And in exchange, the Void gives them a little bit of the cold."
"Is that... is that what you do, Vanya?" Elara asked softly.
The silence that followed was sharper than the wind.
Vanya lowered her head. She reached out and touched the ground, her fingers digging into the ash.
"No," she whispered. "I do not bargain with the wolf. I steal from the carcass."
"Explain it to her," Kaelen said. "She needs to know why we don't use magic unless the math demands it."
Vanya sighed. It was a wet, rattling sound, as if her lungs were filled with dust.
"The Ley Lines," she began. "You see them as faint glimmers in the air sometimes? Like heat haze on a road?"
Elara nodded. "Yes."
"Before," Vanya said, "those were the veins of the world. They carried Mana—the lifeblood of the Titans. Pure. Clean. It made the wheat grow. It made wounds close without scarring."
She held up her hand. Her fingertips were stained black, the veins in her wrist visible and dark, like ink beneath parchment.
"When the Gods died, the heart stopped pumping," she whispered. "The blood stopped moving. It settled. And like blood in a dead body, it went septic. It spoiled."
Vanya clenched her fist.
"The magic that remains in this world is necrotic, Elara. It is poison. When I cast a spell, I am not drawing from a clear river. I am dipping my hands into a stagnant, festering pool. It fights me. It tries to infect me. That is why it hurts. That is why the cost is so high. Every spark of fire I create burns a little bit of my own warmth away."
"And the monsters?" Elara asked. "The Strider-beasts? The Walker?"
"Evolution," Korgath grunted. He was cleaning his hammer, scraping dried ichor from the head with a whetstone. "We breathe air. Fish breathe water. The monsters... they breathe the rot."
"They adapted to the septic mana," Vanya explained. "The Void beasts, the mutants, the horrors of the Rustlands—they are the maggots that breed in the carcass. They don't just tolerate the corruption; they thrive on it. That is why they are stronger than us. We are fighting in an environment that wants us dead, against creatures that were born for it."
Elara looked down at the obsidian dagger. She touched the sharp edge, terrified but fascinated.
"So we're alone," she said. "No Gods. No Paladins. Just... rot."
"And the Ledger," Kaelen said.
He closed the book with a snap. The sound echoed in the canyon like a judge's gavel.
"That is why I count, Elara. That is why we track every ounce of water, every bolt, every breath of air. Because there is no miracle coming to save us. There is no cavalry riding over the hill. There is only the math of survival. We balance the books, or we close them."
He stood up and kicked dirt over the burner, extinguishing the blue flame. Darkness rushed back in, absolute and suffocating.
"Get in the wagon," he ordered. "The wheel is fixed. The axle will hold for another fifty miles if the road is kind. We need to reach the Severance before the storms hit."
Elara climbed up, but she paused at the tailgate. She looked at Vanya, who was feeling her way back to the wagon bed.
"Vanya?"
"Yes, child?"
"If you use too much... if you steal too much from the corpse... what happens?"
Vanya paused. She didn't turn around. Her silhouette was barely visible against the grey glass.
"Then I become part of the rot," she whispered. "And Kaelen will have to balance the ledger."
Kaelen didn't say anything. He didn't offer comfort. He just checked the load on his crossbow, verified the catch was engaged, and climbed onto the bench.
"Forward," he signaled to the beasts.
The Striders groaned, shifting their weight. The wagon lurched forward, grinding over the black glass. They moved into the dark, a tiny speck of heat in a universe that had grown infinitely cold.
Kaelen watched the road ahead. His Audit was slowly calibrating, the numbers steadying into a grim predictability.
Distance to Sector 7: 42 miles. Chance of survival: 18%. Sanity reserves: Depleted.
"Acceptable," he muttered to himself.
He snapped the reins. The silence of the world rushed in to fill the space where their hope used to be, and the wagon rolled on, a funeral procession of one.