Absolute, suffocating silence greeted her upon regaining consciousness. This was not the peaceful quiet of sleeping in the real world, but it had the dead, stagnant stillness of a place completely rid of life. Valerie lay flat on her back, staring upward. No sky existed. Instead, an endless, flat expanse of monochromatic nothingness pressed down from above, a ceiling of featureless, colourless expanse.
Her body was a map of agony. The muscles in her, burned, bones weighed as heavy as lead, and a rhythmic throb threatened to split her skull in two.
Groaning, she forced her punctured memories back together. The blinding melee of the portal. The searing beam of chaotic light. The desperate, safe grip of Cale's hand before they were torn apart.
Val pushed up with trembling arms. Beneath her palms, the ground was fine, midnight black sand. It was freezing to the touch, it possessed a damp, viscous texture that felt uncomfortably like dried blood.
She was Entirely alone.
"Cale?"
Her voice slipped into the vast emptiness, instantly swallowed by the dark. No response. Only the hollow sound of her own ragged breathing.
Shaking, she forced her unsteady legs to bear her weight.
"Hello? pickup?!" Her voice rose in pitch. "Is anyone there?"
Silence answered.
A biting chill seeped into her bones. Her Ember Cloak was gone, dismissed automatically when she lost consciousness. With a heavy breath, she summoned her cloak, brimming with internal energy. The familiar, comforting warmth bloomed across her shoulders, casting a faint, flickering orange glow against the oppressive dark.
The fragile light revealed a landscape of nightmare . Misshapen spires of twisted rock erupted from the black dunes. The horizon curved at a sickening, impossible angle, making her head swim when she stared too long.
The Void. The realm where reality itself lay warped and unreal.
Keep calm. Time for an inventory. Her gauntlet was ruined, its crystalline display utterly dark and shattered. Her whip remained coiled at her hip, for some reason it didn't automatically dismiss; and the reassuring weight of her knife pressed against her boot. But her Mauri, was dangerously depleted at a mere forty percent. No food, no water, no shelter. Worse, a deep, gnawing hunger clawed at her stomach.
She picked a direction purely at random and began to walk.
She walked until her knees buckled from exhaustion, and dragged herself into a seated position, rested until the trembling on her knees stopped, and forced herself back onto her feet.
In this godforsaken place, the ambient light never changed. No sun to track time, no stars to guide her, and no way to measure the passage of time. The sky just remained trapped in a perpetual, eerie twilight, an eternal evening that never yielded to night, yet it never welcomed the dawn.
Turning the mind into a clock to preserve sanity was the best she could do.
One, two, three.
Each step, each shallow breath, each thudding heartbeat became a numeric anchor. When the count finally reached ten thousand, she allowed herself to stop.
A narrow fissure split at the side of a massive black monolith. It was a suffocatingly tight squeeze, but it offered protection. Pressing her spine against the freezing stone, she pulled the glowing fabric of her Ember Cloak tightly around her frame and closed her eyes.
But sleep decided otherwise.
Every instinct screamed intruder. This was the hunting ground of ancient, terrible abominations, and she had walked directly into their jaws. Hyper vigilant in the dark, she waited for the sound of claws against stone.
By the second cycle of arbitrary timekeeping, the pangs of hunger evolved into a blinding, agonizing torment. Then she saw the trees.
They were stunted, with ash gray structures and branches that wrinkled like frozen serpents. Clusters of pale, bulbs sprouted from the bark. Val froze. Harlow's dry academy lectures surfaced from the depths of her memory.
Void root.
It was a wretched, parasitic growth. It was edible, but it carried a cruel catch. The plant could replenish Mauri essence, but the taste was a violent assault on the senses.
Desperate, she tore a handful from the bark and shoved them into her mouth. The flavor hit instantly, a searing, chemical-like bitterness that made her eyes water and her stomach heave. Gagging, she forced herself to swallow. Almost immediately, a faint warmth radiated through her chest. Her Mauri nudged upward. A fraction of physical strength returned.
Driven by grim determination, she packed as many of the bitter bulbs as her pockets could hold and pushed forward.
After what seemed to be the third day, water appeared.
A narrow, sluggish stream cut through the black sands. The liquid was as dark as liquid obsidian, yet bizarrely translucent. Kneeling by the bank, she hesitated, studying the strange fluid before scooping it up in her cupped palms.
Freezing, tasting faintly of iron, but it was clean. At least that's what I have to believe. She drank greedily, filling her belly until it ached, before fashioning a makeshift pouch from a strip of her torn jacket to carry a reserve.
Her reflection stared back from the dark, glassy surface. Her face had grown pale, her cheekbones sharp, her eyes had graves in their sockets, she had the haunted look of a survivor pushing past all limits.
She shattered the image with her boot and turned away.
The nameless days began to pass. A mechanical, grueling routine took over. Walk, rest, choke down the bitter roots, drink the black water.
Yet, the easy sustenance felt like a trap. The roots kept her alive, but they provided no true nourishment for her muscles. Her body was wasting away. An encounter with a true threat would find her too weak to fight back.
I need meat. A cold resolve settled over her. I need to hunt.
She began with the small things, the minor abominations that scurried beneath the twisted rocks. Fallen creatures, but small, roughly the size of a human forearm. Still, they were horrifying things, possessing too many segmented legs, uneven mandibles, and chitinous shells far too durable for their size.
Hours of meticulous preparation, hiding in the freezing mud and holding her breath until her lungs burned, led to this single, miserable moment.
The target was a diminutive abomination, no larger than a common house cat (that's now extinct, decades ago), its appearance a sheer mockery of nature. Its low slung body was encased in a seamless, segmented carapace of midnight black chitin, while a singular, horn protruded from its armored brow like a rusted spike. It looked clumsy, but size in the Void was a deadly illusion. The creature possessed a terrifying, condensed density. Every muscle beneath that shell was a coiled spring of malicious intent.
Now.
Lunging from the brush, she brought a makeshift blade crudely fashioned from a shard of volcanic rock down in a brutal arc, aiming for the joint beneath its horn. The creature was blindingly fast. With a sharp hiss, it threw its weight forward, meeting her steel with its armored head.
Clang!
The impact vibrated up her arms, numbing her fingers and nearly tearing the hilt from her grasp. Like striking a solid block of enchanted iron, and not flesh and bone. The force of the deflection threw her off balance, her boots slid through the treacherous dirt.
The abomination didn't waste any time. It charged foward, its tiny hooves tearing up the earth, aiming that wicked horn straight for her ankle.
She gritted her teeth and held her ground; retreat meant cowardice. Instead, she used her shifting momentum to pivot, letting the horn graze her leather boot with a screech of friction. As the beast rushed past, she reversed her grip and drove her blade downward with the entirety of her weight, targeting the softer underbelly exposed for a fraction of a second.
The blade bit into flesh. Black, foul smelling blood spurted over her hands as the creature shrieked, a sound like metal tearing. It thrashed violently, nearly snapping her wrist, but she held on, twisting the sharp stone until the frenzied, muffled scraping beneath her finally fell still.
Breathing heavily, muscles trembling from the brief, explosive exertion, she stared down at her bloody hands.
Her first kill in the Void. A small, grueling creature, and entirely devoid of glory.
By the fifth cycle of her arbitrary timekeeping, the scale of her hunts grew. She faced a beast the size of a starving wolf, a monstrosity with a leathery hide and claws that left deep marks on the ground.
The battle cost her dearly. She bled profusely, her muscles tore, forcing her to use every underhanded tactic available just to survive. But as the beast finally collapsed into the black sand, its life sputtering out, a sudden, familiar chime echoed inside her mind.
Her ruined gauntlet flickered with a ghostly, ethereal light, projecting the runes of the system into the dim air:
````
[Memory Acquired: Void Fang]
[Memory Rank: Fallen]
[Memory Type: Dagger]
[A wicked tooth pulled from the jaws of a scavenger that ran far into the dark. It is light, desperate, and exceptionally sharp. It hungers to tear through the armor of things larger than itself.]
````
She summoned it, weight materialized in her palm. she looked down at a dagger carved from pure, pale bone. Unnaturally light, reeking with a faint, predatory malice. With a thought, she dismissed it back into her system and continued her endless trek.
On the seventh day, the true nightmare found her.
A massive silhouette materialized on the distant horizon, moving with terrifying speed. Val dropped instantly, pressing her body behind a boulder, catching breath in her throat.
An apex predator. The abomination was gargantuan, its sleek body covered in heavy, overlapping scales that shimmered like dark diamonds. A pair of massive, leathery wings were folded tightly against its back. It walked on four powerful limbs, but its head was a draconic horror, featuring golden, unblinking eyes and a maw lined with rows of bone crushing teeth.
It possessed no magical aura, no elemental abilities. If it did have, it was doing very well hiding it. It was a manifestation of pure, unadulterated, armored destruction. And those golden eyes locked directly onto her hiding spot.
Run.
She bolted, but the instinct to run was useless. The beast closed the distance in a matter of heartbeats, its massive claws tearing the black desert apart. Val spun, throwing a desperate torrent of fire from her palms. The flames washed over its scales and vanished, completely ignored.
She lashed out with her whip, but the fiery leather merely tangled in its armored ridges, failing to leave even a scratch. Desperate, she summoned the Void Fang and drove the bone dagger into its flank. The blade scraped violently against the diamond scales, throwing sparks, finding absolutely no purchase.
With a casual, backhanded motion, the beast swatted her aside.
The impact sent her flying. She slammed into the hard ground, rolling violently across the sharp sand. Her Ember Cloak danced wildly before dying completely, its energy depleted. Her left arm hung numb and useless at her side. Mauri was entirely spent.
The draconic abomination stalked toward her, its movements agonizingly slow, patient, and entirely confident. It stood over her, opening its massive jaws to reveal a cavern of teeth.
Val tried to push up, but her legs refused to respond. Try to kindle even a spark of fire in her palm; nothing, her soul was empty.
Death descended.
The bastard. I'm not going to die here, not yet.
Then, in the shadows.
Without warning, a towering mass of pure darkness erupted from the air, slamming directly into the beast's side with the force of a falling meteor. The dragon roared in shock as razor sharp claws raked deep, devastating grooves through its impenetrable scales.
The black shadow was a blur of lethal velocity, darting around the massive beast, striking again and again with terrifying precision. The diamond hard skin cracked, and thick, jet black blood rained down onto the desert sand.
Broken and bleeding, the apex predator issued a terrified cry, turned its massive frame, and fled into the gray haze. Loosing its favoured meal.
The shadow entity landed heavily in front of Val, throwing up a cloud of black dust.
A humanoid monstrosity, tall and imposing, its skin woven from the very fabric of the dark. Elegant, terrifying wings unfolded from its back, and three burning, golden eyes stared down from a face that was a hauntingly beautiful, yet utterly monstrous visage. Claws dripped with foul abomination ichor.
Panicking, Val scrambled backward through the dirt, her right hand instinctively grabbing the handle of her whip, her posture locking into a desperate defensive stance. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird.
The three eyed entity stared, its gaze unblinking, before its jaw moved.
"You are safe," it rumbled, its voice a strange, layered echo.
Val didn't lower her weapon, her knuckles white. "What… what are you?"
"Its with me."
The quiet, exhausted voice drifted from the gloom behind her.
Val spun around.
Standing at the edge of the dim light stood Cale. He leaned heavily on his sword, his face deathly pale, his clothes reduced to bloodied rags. Noticeably thinner, his eyes hollowed out by dark shadows, but breathing. Alive.
Her whip remained half raised, her mind flatly refusing to process the reality of his presence.
Cale took a single, agonizing step forward, his gaze soft. "Val."
The whip slipped from her fingers. Instantly, all strength left her body, and her legs gave out completely. But the cold, black sand never came. Cale moved, catching her in his arms before the darkness could claim her again.