Chapter 171. I am what you will become...
Even before the sun had risen over the eastern hills, I left the comfort of the hotel room.
Kaelira was still asleep, curled beneath the sheets with one arm draped across her stomach, breathing evenly. I didn’t bother waking her. She needed the rest. What I needed was answers.
But the truth was—I already knew I wasn’t going into that forest for peace.
My boots crunched softly over the morning dew as I crossed the overgrown path, until I once again reached the cursed portal. It floated in the air like a jagged wound in the world—black and purple, pulsing like a living organ. A rift that defied explanation, the same one I had visited before.
The wind carried an unnatural chill near it. And yet... I wasn’t alone.
This time, it wasn’t one of the [Spawns of Vorr’Kael] waiting for me. No twisted abomination. No bestial monstrosity.
Instead, a man crouched on the forest floor in front of the rift.
His skin was pale and mottled with black and purplish rot, like necrosis that refused to die. His height—tall, imposing—reached nearly six-foot-eight. His hair was unkempt and raven-black, his eyes a dull, familiar brown.
No. Not just familiar.
Painfully familiar.
He looked like someone I knew... someone I used to be.