The "hallucination" didn't just warp the room; it shattered it, and for a heartbeat, he didn't see Gary. He saw a collection of pulsing, ugly veins; thick, muddy brown energy flowing through a man who was mostly filth.
'Kill him,' Soren thought, like a cornered animal.
But as the intent flared, the Tranquil Poison reacted, and Soren could have sworn he heard an ancient and yet babyish voice chuckle in amusement.
It was almost as if the owner of the voice was slapping his indignant thought in the face with the flaring tranquil poison.
The venom seemed to sense his anger and used it as a bridge; a spike of unprecedented peppery heat shot from his stomach to his brain, and Soren collapsed, his face hitting the dirt.
He couldn't move. He couldn't scream. He could only listen to the sound of Gary laughing as he gathered up the scrolls; the blue-inked records of his only joy, and walk out into the dewy morning.
"Don't worry, little ghost," Gary's voice floated back from the porch. "You won't need to read where you're going."
The silence that followed Gary's departure was even heavier than the noise of his boots; it was the silence of a tomb that had been looted.
Soren laid on the packed-earth floor, his cheek pressed against the grit.
The cold no longer external, but a forced that had colonised him. Without the moth-eaten quilt, the room's temperature dropped to match the stone walls, leaving Soren to experience his core temperature slowly dwindle.
A few feet away, Liora finally stirred; the sound of her shifting was like glass grinding on silk.
She was crawling her way toward him, her movements jerky and pained, and when she finally reached him, her breath hitched; a wet, pattering sound that told Soren her emotions were just as bruised as his spirit.
He could see how much she tried to hide her subtle sobs behind her messy night-purple hair and intermittent sniffles, a sound that hurt him more than the poison currently rampaging through his nerves and veins.
He wanted to tell her he was sorry. He wanted to tell her that he would fix it. But he was just a seven-year-old boy with thirty poisons in his blood, staring at a room that refused to stay solid.
"I'm sorry," she whispered with a voice as thin as thread of silver in a suffocating darkness. "I couldn't... I couldn't stop him."
Soren tried to speak, but his tongue was a dry husk. He wanted to tell her that it didn't matter. He wanted to tell her that the scrolls were just paper, and the quilt was just wool. But the lie wouldn't form.
Those scrolls had been his eyes into a world where children weren't born as "Sinkholes."
They were his only evidence that a life existed outside the Weeping Cottage; but now, he was truly empty.
As Liora pulled him into a weak embrace, trying to share the meager warmth of her own body, the Tranquil Poison entered a new phase of its nightly cycle.
Usually, the venom simmered and spread quietly until it was time to flare up. But tonight, fueled by the adrenaline of the confrontation and the lack of food, it boiled.
Soren felt a sudden, white-hot needle drive into the base of his spine. His back arched involuntarily, his muscles seizing with such violence that his bones groaned under the tension.
'Here it is,' He thought, a strange sense of relief washing over him. The thirtieth venom. The one that finally stops the clock.
His vision didn't just blur; it detonated.
The darkness of the cottage exploded into a kaleidoscope of nauseating light. The walls didn't just turn translucent; they seemed to dissolve into a shifting pattern of geometric shadows.
He looked at Liora, but he didn't see the girl. He saw a flickering, dying candle; a pale amber glow that was being dimmed by the cold and... fear?
Then he looked down at himself.
And there it was;
Right in the center of his own chest, where a warrior would have a steadily glowing spark, there was nothing.
But it wasn't a "nothing" like an empty room; it was a "nothing" like a passed-out consciousness.
A swirling spherical vacuum of absolute black that seemed to be pulling at the light around it; trying to even drag Liora's amber glow and the tallow candle's flame into its center.
Soren squeezed his eyes shut, his stomach heaving.
'Stop it. Stop looking. It's just the sickness. It's the brain-rot.'
He fell into a state that wasn't sleep, but wasn't consciousness either.
It felt like a fever-dream where the weeping of the cottage became a chorus of voices, all of them whispering his name, the name he no longer possessed.
He saw his mother's face, a blurred memory of soft hair and the scent of jasmine, but as he reached for her, she turned into gray ash and blew away in a wind that smelled of bitter almonds.
Suddenly, Soren was jolted back into the physical world by a sound that made the previous kick to the door seem like a lover's tap.
The entire front wall of the cottage seemed to shudder as a horn blasted; the long, low, mournful note of the Banishment Call.
Soren's eyes snapped open. His "visions" swiftly receding into a dull, throbbing kaleidoscope at the edges of his sight, but the reality he saw at the centre was even worse.
The door had already broken and was currently being held aside by the tip of a spear.
Two gladiator-looking guards in the heavy, leather armor of the Outer Rim stood there.
They didn't have the sneering malice of Gary; no, they simply wore the cold, bureaucratic indifference of men clearing a fallen tree from a road.
"Nameless Guest," the lead guard barked, his baritone vibrating the very air in the cramped room like charged thunderclouds.
"The Council of Elders has spoken. Your presence has cracked the Truth-seeker Orb and brought a blight upon the autumn harvest.
You are no longer permitted to dwell within the inner or outer rims of the House Ignis."
Liora weakly scrambled to her feet, her hands balled into tiny, useless fists.
"The sun isn't even out yet! He can't even walk! You're killing him!"
The guard didn't even design her a glance, he acted almost as if she didn't exist.
"The decree is immediate.
He is to be escorted to the boundary of the Outer Wastelands.
If he is found within three kilometers of the tribe's border by sunrise, he will be executed as a trespasser."
The spear tip moved closer to Soren's chest, its iron frosty cold, but the threat it carried, searing hot.
"Get up, ghost," the guard commanded.
"Walk, or we'll drag you behind the horses."
Soren looked at Liora. He saw the sheer, unadulterated terror in her eyes, and for a moment, the poison's grip on his heart seemed to loosen, replaced by a cold, crystalline spite.
They weren't just banishing him. They were throwing him away before he could die on their doorstep and "stain" their soil forever.
He weakly reached out, grabbing the leg of the bedside table to haul himself up.
His joints screamed. His lungs burned. But he stood. He stood upon legs that felt like they were made of glass, casting a long-stretching jagged shadow across the dirt floor.
"I am going," Soren said. His voice was no longer a rasp; it was thin, like the glint of a sharp blade.
Liora moved to grab a small bag just behind his bedframe; she had clearly been preparing for this, packing a few crusts of bread and a spare tunic for herself which she hid behind his bedframe.
But the guard was having none of it, he blocked her path with his spear.
"The girl stays," the guard said.
"She belongs to the tribe's servant pool. The Nameless takes nothing that was grown on Ignis land."
"She's a person, not a tool!" Soren hissed, taking a stumbling step forward.
The guard however, merely barked out a short laugh in reply
"To the tribe, you're both tools. One is just broken while the other still has its uses. Move!"
Soren felt Liora's hand brush against his back one last time; a frantic sobbing touch, before he was shoved out into the dark.
The air outside was even colder than in the cottage.
The stars above were still bright and uncaring, offering no omens, no signs, no hope.
There was no hero to come to his rescue. There was only the long, dark road toward the border, the smell of the guards' horses, and the knowledge that every step he took was a step closer to a place where no one ever returned from.
Nevertheless, Soren didn't look back at the Weeping Cottage.
He didn't look back at the light in the window where Liora stood screaming his forbidden name.
He just looked at the dirt, taking one agonizing step at a time, waiting for the thirty poisons in his blood to finally meet the silence of the Wastelands.
-------
The road to the Outer Wastelands didn't look like a road at all; it was more like a scar across the earth, a jagged line of flint and frozen mud that seemed to resent the very weight of those who walked upon it.
Soren stumbled, his knees hitting the sharp edges of the path for the fourth time since they had left the outer rim of the estate.
The impact sent a jar of hot, unadulterated agony up his thighs, clashing with the dull, throbbing ache of the Tranquil Poison that hung like a lead weight in his lower back.
He didn't cry out. He didn't have the breath for it.
He was rationing every ounce of oxygen and hot air within his body that was already systematically shutting down its non-essential functions to keep a failing heart beating just one more time.
~Clop-thud~ ~Clop-thud~
Behind him, the rhythmic thuds of the guards' horses acted as a cruel metronome for his misery.
They were massive, battle-bred beasts with nostrils that flared in the cold, venting plumes of hot steam that looked like the exhaust of a gulfstream jet.
To the guards atop them, Soren was not even a nuisance anymore. He was simply a package being delivered to a destination called Forgotten.
They ignored him, didn't speak to him, or even yell. They simply loomed; the shadows of their spears stretching long and thin over his head like the hands of a clock counting down to sunrise.
The air grew thinner and colder as they moved away from the geothermal vents that warmed the iuter tribe estate.
Here, on the fringes of the territory, the wind had teeth. It whipped across the open plains, carrying the scent of dead grass and the metallic tang of the coming winter.
Soren looked at his hands. In the pale, silver light of the moon, they looked like the hands of a drowned man. The blue ink he had spent years accumulating was beginning to peel away, exposed to the raw friction of the elements.
'One step,' he told himself in a ragged whisper of an internal monologue.
'One step to spite the Matron. One step because Liora is watching from a window I can no longer see.'
The "hallucinations" began to swarm his mind again, more aggressive than they had been in the cottage.
'It's the hunger' he reasoned, feeling like His brain was cannibalizing itself.
Then as his boots dragged through a particularly deep patch of slush, Soren's world suddenly tilted.