"Come. There is something you should see. Something that will explain everything."
They led him through a corridor that ended in a door.
This door was not like the others Kaelen had passed. It was iron, black and pitted, with no handle on this side. The seams where it met the stone were filled with a substance that looked like dried wax but smelled of old blood and honey. Silas pressed his palm against the center of the door, and the iron sighed a long, low exhale that vibrated up through Kaelen's bare feet and settled in his chest.
The door swung open.
The room beyond was vast far larger than the exterior of the manor should have allowed. Kaelen felt a flicker of wrongness, the same wrongness he had felt in the bone fields when space had bent around him. The ceiling was lost in darkness. The walls, if there were walls, could not be seen. The floor was smooth stone, polished to a mirror shine, and in the center of the room-
The gate.
It reminded him of how he died the first time and his senses sharpened. He tried to turn back but the door was closed he sighed and decided he needed to reevalute his ability to survive.
The hum vibrated as if agreeing.
He looked at the two infront of him moving in sync bending and standing. They kept chanting something that was making his head ache the more he listened.
The system flickered:
[ Dead, but not yet. Empty, but not sad. And still it stared "The Sleeping King to wake. The old world to burn. The new world to rise from its ashes."]
[Note: The words below contain persuasive mana, it convinces the listener to believe.]
That explains a lot.
He looked at the gate, it had changed It now looked like a wound. A vertical gash in the air, twelve feet tall, its edges ragged and weeping with a light that was not light a deep, pulsing violet that made Kaelen's eyes ache. The air around it shimmered, heat rising in waves, and the smell that came from it was the smell of a thousand rotten fish with something sweet underneath, like fruit that had begun to turn.
Suddenly the wound blinked like an eye and he felt dizzy when he came to he was kneeling and sweat was trickling down his back. He tried standing but could not, he felt something weighing down on him.
The system flickered and he blinked weakly, fighting against the suppression field:
[Location: Inner Sanctum – Veiled Chorus]
[Artifact Detected: The Sleeping Gate – Partial]
[Status: Ajar.]
[Warning: What lies beyond is not meant for this world.]
Kaelen stared at the gate. The hum beneath his skin, suppressed and muffled, screamed.
"This," Silas said, spreading his arms wide, "is what your gold built. The Gate of Teeth. The doorway to the Sleeping King's prison. We have been feeding it for three years mana, blood, silver, gold, the souls of children and soon, soon, it will open fully. And when it does, the King will wake. And the world will kneel."
He turned to look at Kaelen, his pale eyes gleaming in the violet light.
"You came here for your money, little lamb. But I will give you something better. I will give you a place. At the King's side. When he rises, the faithful will be rewarded. And you, you who have survived, who have grown,you will be among the first to feast."
Kaelen looked at the gate. The violet light pulsed, and for a moment, just a moment, he saw something moving behind it. A shape, a face, too large, too wrong, its features sliding and reforming like oil on water.
His palm burned. The fragment of the Sovereign's Lost, buried beneath his skin, woke.
And in that moment, Kaelen understood something that Silas did not.
The thing on the other side was not sleeping.
The system flickered one last time:
[Objective Update – Hidden Information Revealed]
[The Sleeping King is not a god. It is a parasite. The gate is not a prison. It is a lure.]
[Status: The gate is opening. Estimated time: Unknown.]
This is the parasite that invaded the kingdom enable sacrifices to be made and allowing the actual 'god' to awaken.
"I'll take my money, please," he said quietly.
Theron's smile faltered.
And behind them, the gate pulsed and a crack, thin as a hair, split open along its violet edge.
The room grew cold.
Something on the other side breathed.
The rift swallowed him whole.
One moment Kaelen stood in the cult's inner sanctum, violet light bleeding across the polished floor, the gate pulsing like an infected wound. The next moment the air tore like the last breath of something that had been holding on too long and then he was falling.
Sideways.
The world folded around him, colors bleeding into colors, the walls of the manor stretching like taffy until they snapped. He hit the ground hard, his palms scraping against something dry and rough, the breath knocked from his lungs in a single, ugly gasp. Sprite tumbled from his pocket, hissing, claws scrabbling against his chest before the creature scrambled onto his shoulder and dug in.