Pain was not the first thing to arrive. The cold was.
A relentless, sticky cold that seeped into his bones, even into the hollow spaces within them. Consciousness returned slowly, like an air bubble rising from the bottom of dark waters. First, he heard the sounds; or rather, the absence of them. An absolute, suffocating silence reigned. There was only the wheezing rhythm of his own breath and an irregular, wet fluttering echoing in his ribcage.
He tried to open his eyes, but his lashes were glued together by dried fluid. He forced them. When his eyelids tore open, the view he met was not pitch blackness, but a gray twilight. Above, far above, a lead-colored sky leaked a pale light through a massive rift.
He tried to move. He wanted to lift his right arm, but the limb felt heavy and numb, as if it belonged to someone else. He wiggled his fingers. Under his palm, he felt a hard, rough, and wet floor. This was not soil. It was not stone. His fingertips traced rough surfaces; rounded protrusions, sharp fractures, empty eye sockets…
A skull.
Terror sat in his stomach like a cold stone. The place where he lay was the foot of a hill formed by the piling of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of bones. "The Pit of Failures." He did not know where this name came from in his mind, but he did not doubt its truth. This place was the bowels of the world; the final stop for the digested and the forgotten.
As he tried to sit up, a sharp pain shot through his palm. He lost his balance and pressed his hand onto the sharp point of a broken rib. The sharp bone tore his skin like paper.
Reflexively, he pulled his hand back and looked at the wound. The warm redness he expected was absent.
From the slit in his palm, a pitch-black liquid, as heavy and viscous as tar, oozed out slowly. His blood did not flow; it crawled. The black liquid spread like a stain over his pale gray skin. Kaelen —he remembered that this was his name the moment he saw that blackness— brought his other hand to his chest in horror.
The armor on him was like a blacksmith's nightmare. Different pieces of metal; rusted chains, blackened leather straps, and plates of indistinct origin stood as if welded to his skin, stitched to his flesh. On the chest plate, there was a wolf's head relief that was about to fade away, but the wolf's eyes had been gouged out.
"What am I?" he whispered. His voice sounded like the squeak of a rusty hinge unused for years. His throat was dry, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
He stumbled a few steps to get to his feet. The pile of bones crunched with every step, sliding out from under him. Ahead, there was a shallow pool where rotten water had accumulated. The surface of the water was motionless, reflecting the gloom of the ceiling like a black mirror. Kaelen knelt by the water's edge.
The reflection in the water could not be his.
His face was the color of death. A pale, marble-gray skin had sharpened his features. But what truly froze him were the black veins climbing upward from his neck, just beneath his skin. It was as if a tree had taken root inside him, extending its poisonous branches toward his face.
And his eyes…
His left eye was brown. A familiar brown, belonging to a human. That eye was currently trembling, the eyelid twitching, widening in terror. There was fear in that eye. There was the desperation of the question, "Who am I?"
But his right eye… There was nothing there. No white, no iris, no pupil. The eye socket was filled with a pure, unrippling darkness. A well of nothingness. That eye did not blink. That eye did not fear. That eye was not looking at the reflection in the water, but at the flow of energy beneath it, at the gray aura radiating from the bones.
Kaelen wanted to touch his right eye with trembling fingers, but as his fingers approached that darkness, his skin tingled. It was like two separate entities trapped in a single body. One, a child wanting to scream; the other, an executioner waiting silently.
Just then, from the back of his mind, came that voice suppressing the clatter of bones.
...not yet... it is not over...
The voice was merely a whisper. He could not distinguish if it was the howling of the wind or a trick of his mind. It had a feminine timbre but lacked human warmth; it was cold and mechanical, more like the sliding open of an old, forgotten tomb's lid. It had no direction, no source; it echoed directly inside his skull.
Kaelen turned his head sharply, searching for a silhouette in the darkness. There was no one. Only endless piles of bones and a rotten silence.
...rise. Take it...
"Who?" he snarled into the void. Even his own voice sounded alien to him. "What?"
No answer came. He felt only an indescribable pull in his ribcage, just below his heart. Like a magnet calling to metal, an invisible hand was pushing him toward the peak of the bone hill, toward that spot remaining in the semi-darkness.
He took a step against his will. As the ribs and femurs cracked beneath his feet, that pull grew stronger. It was as if the thing there was calling the black liquid in Kaelen's veins to itself.
When he reached the peak of the hill, reaching that thing half-buried among the rubble, his breath was cut short.
A massive, cumbersome heap of iron. This was not an elegant knight's sword; it was certainly not the kind of gleaming steel kings would wear at their waists or bards would sing about. Its hilt was wrapped in gray, flaking leather gnawed by the teeth of time. Its barrel was wide, crude, and covered in rust in places. Its tip was broken. It looked not like a weapon, but like a construction beam, perhaps an instrument of execution.
But Kaelen's right eye, that pitch-black void, could see the pale gray halos around the metal.
He reached out a trembling hand. The moment his fingertips touched the hilt, an electric current jumped from his skin to the metal.
The metal was cold. Cold as death. When Kaelen wrapped his fingers around the hilt, he felt that black, tar-like blood leaking from the cut in his palm pass from skin to metal. The sword sucked the blood. It drank with a greedy appetite, like a sponge.
From the depths of the sword came a deep thudding sound, a pulse that only Kaelen could hear. Thud… Thud…
The faint runes on the rusty metal glowed red like embers for a moment and then faded. Kaelen knew the sword's name not as a memory, but as a feeling.
MOURNING.
He pulled it out with one hand, as if it were a limb. The sword was heavy; heavy enough to drag his shoulders down, heavy enough that an ordinary man would struggle to lift it even with two hands. But this weight was not just physical. The moment Kaelen touched the metal, he felt the weight of others' last breaths, their regrets, and their silent screams in the palm of his hand. Mourning was not an empty vessel; it was full. And now, it was clinging to Kaelen.
"I have to get out of here," he said to himself. His voice was no longer trembling. The presence of the sword had transformed that vague fear into a focused survival instinct.
He fixed his gaze upward, at that rift leaking pale light.
The climb demanded a price.
The walls were steep and slippery. A hellish slope composed of rotten earth, moss-covered stones, and skeletal fragments wedged in between. Kaelen struggled to attach Mourning to the old leather strap on his back. The weight of the metal wanted to pull him back down, back to that graveyard of bones, with every movement.
He dug his fingers into a slime-covered ledge. He pulled himself up. His muscles burned, and the black veins beneath his skin became more prominent and throbbed with the effort. Instead of sweat, a cold, oily liquid trickled from his pale gray skin.
When he had risen a few meters, the stone he was holding shifted. Kaelen swung into the void, grabbing a piece of root at the last moment. It was not a root, but a femur jutting out of the earth. As the dry bone crumbled in his hand, he gritted his teeth, dug his nails into the mud, and continued climbing.
His breath circulated in his lungs like shards of glass. With every meter, the heavy smell of death from the pit below diminished, leaving its place to the smell of rain and wet stone.
With one last effort, he threw himself up through the rift. He fell onto a hard, stone-paved floor.
He lay on his back. The sky was here. A gloomy sky, covered with closed, gray clouds. A thin, stinging rain was falling. The drops washed away the mud and black blood on his face, leaving trails on his gray skin.
This was the top of "The Pit of Failures." The remnants of an old world. Massive gothic arches reached for the sky, most pillars were collapsed, and the stone pavers on the ground had been shattered by giant roots. The surroundings were silent, but this silence was not dead like the one below; it was a waiting, lurking silence.
The wind whistled as it passed through the ruins.
Kaelen stood up, stumbling. He was trying to get used to the weight of Mourning on his back. While his left eye scanned the surroundings in the blur of the rain, his right eye —that nothingness— watched the energy currents in the air, the gray ribbons of the wind.
At the exit of the ruins, there was a massive stone archway. The path passed through there. There was no other exit.
And the path was not empty.
Under the arch, in the rain and shadow, stood that thing, motionless as a mountain.
GROTH, THE GRAVE KEEPER.
The entity had long surpassed human limits, transforming into a grotesque statue. It was at least three meters tall. Its skin was as hard as gray granite and full of cracks. But what was terrifying was not its size, but its form. Its back… Its back was hunched, and from that hump, crooked tombstones protruded like arrows pierced into its flesh.
When Groth breathed, its chest inflated like a bellows, and those tombstones on its back rubbed against each other, grinding. Grind… Grind… The sound of stone rubbing against stone drowned out the sound of the rain.
It had no face. A rusty iron plate had been nailed where its face should have been. A yellow vapor smelling of rotten flesh leaked from the plate's grates. In its hand, it held a massive, uprooted tombstone tied to its wrist with thick chains. Not a weapon, it had made a monument into a weapon.
Groth caught the scent carried by the wind. The scent of the stranger. The scent of that "unfinished" one.
It turned its massive head slowly toward Kaelen, like a rusty mechanism.
"Peace..." Its voice was like thunder coming from a deep cave; the words were muffled and heavy. "...disturbed..."
Kaelen's left eye widened in terror. His human side felt his knees give way upon seeing this machine of destruction. He had to run. He had to hide. When that sledgehammer came down, nothing but crushed flesh and bone would remain.
But his right eye…
That pitch-black void saw the micro-cracks in Groth's armor. It marked with gray precision that the creature was shifting its weight to its left leg, that the muscle fibers in its right shoulder were tensing, and the soft tissue beneath the metal plate on its neck. The Nothingness did not fear. The Nothingness only processed data.
Groth roared. With this sound, the puddles on the ground trembled. It raised that massive tombstone in its hand into the air. Chains rattled, and the stones on its back crashed against each other, creating a terrible clatter.
Kaelen gripped Mourning's hilt with both hands. His black blood soaked into the leather of the sword. Time hung suspended for the duration of a heartbeat, just before that inevitable blow.
A massive shadow fell over Kaelen, like fate. The tombstone descended.
The world shook with an explosion that deafened the ears and made the teeth ache.
As Kaelen's left eye reflexively closed at the speed of the oncoming death, his right eye —that emotionless nothingness— sliced time into gray segments. It downloaded into his mind, like a cold stream of data, the angle of the sledgehammer's fall, the vector of the stone scatter, and the only angle where he could survive.
He threw his body to the side. Not with his will, but with muscle memory obeying the route drawn by his right eye.
The massive stone mass crashed into the ground where he had stood a second ago. The paving stones were pulverized, sharp shrapnel flying in the air. The pressure wave rolled Kaelen like a rag doll. His back hit a hard pillar, emptying the air from his lungs. The metal plates of his armor dug into his chest, but he was not dead.
Groth tried to wrench its weapon from the ground with a clumsy but unstoppable momentum. Chains rattled. As the creature turned toward its escaping prey, the tombstones on its back rubbed together. This sound was like thousands of teeth grinding at once.
Kaelen lifted Mourning. The sword trembled strangely at that moment. Not from fear, but from hunger.
When Groth freed its weapon, its ribcage was left defenseless. At the junction of those rusty armor plates, there was a pulsing crack glowing with a weak, gray light. The center of the entity.
Now.
Kaelen lunged. Not with a scream, but clenching his teeth until they nearly broke. His right eye divided the time it took for Groth to lift its massive arm into milliseconds.
He did not swing Mourning. Rotating his entire body, he used the massive weight of the sword like a cannonball. The sword accelerated with centrifugal force, making a muffled sound in the air.
Target: That crack between the chest plates.
The moment of impact was not the sharp sound of metal cutting metal, but a wet crunch. Mourning's blunt tip tore through Groth's rusty chest armor and buried itself inside, deep into that gray flesh, into the source of the light.
Groth froze. The grinding of the tombstones on its back ceased. The yellow smoke issuing from its visor paused for a moment.
Kaelen did not let go of the sword's hilt. He could not. His hands were glued to the hilt. Because the sword had begun to drink.
Groth's wound did not bleed. Mourning was vacuuming the gray, rotten essence inside the creature. The runes on the sword glowed with a blinding crimson light. A current as cold as ice and as sharp as a razor rushed into Kaelen's arms, from there to his shoulders, and finally to his mind.
Groth staggered back with a painful, metallic groan, but dragged Kaelen with it. Then, like the toppling of a massive statue, it collapsed onto its knees. And finally, it fell face-first onto the ground.
Kaelen stood on the sword, stepping on the creature's chest. He could not breathe. His heart was beating in his throat. And then, darkness came. But this was not unconsciousness.
This was a Flood of Memories.
Colors exploded. Gray ruins were wiped away. They left their place to a golden sun and a green meadow.
Kaelen looked at his own hands. These were not his gray, dead hands. They were calloused, sun-tanned, strong human hands. He was holding a shovel.
By the edge of the pit lay a small body wrapped in white linen. A girl. Her face was peaceful but pale. Plague spots covered her neck.
"Forgive me..." The man's voice trembled. This was Groth's voice, but not yet monstrous. "I couldn't protect you, Liora. The walls weren't enough. The medicines weren't enough."
The man thrust the shovel. With every toss of earth, a piece of his soul tore away. As the sun set, shadows lengthened. The man knelt by the grave.
"I will not go," he whispered. "I will not leave you alone here. I will wait. I will wait until death reunites us."
Then a shadow fell over him. A tall, robed figure. Its face was not visible. "Do you wish to wait?" the voice said. "I can give you eternity, gravedigger."
"Give it," the man said. "Whatever the cost."
"HAAH!"
Kaelen was thrown backward as air filled his lungs. He fell onto the wet stone floor on his back. The image was gone. The sun, the girl, that grief... all gone. Only the rain, the ruins, and the massive corpse beside him remained.
But the feelings had not gone. A tear that did not belong to him rolled from Kaelen's left eye. In his chest, he held the mourning of a girl he did not know, Liora. This pain was so fresh that it made him forget his own physical wounds.
Groth was dead. Its body was already turning into gray dust and scattering in the wind. Only rusty armor pieces and a silver medallion shining among the ashes remained.
Kaelen picked up the medallion. Its lid was open; inside was a faded portrait of a girl. The coldness of the metal burned his palm.
...the first is done... said the female voice in his mind. ...continue.
Kaelen stood up. His body had changed. His skin felt harder, thicker now. Groth's endurance, along with its curse, had passed to Kaelen.
He passed through the massive arched gate at the exit of the ruins. A new hell stretched out before him.