Chapter 134: Chronia
I reach toward the crystal.
"Careful..." Rhayne says behind me. Whispering carefully.
"Yeah... I will..."
I touch the altar.
The energy rushes into me and out of me at the same time. Something pours in and something gets pulled out, both sensations sharing the same space in my chest. My vision goes dark at the edges, then blurs, then blinks several times in rapid succession—my eyelids working on their own.
When it settles, I’m not in the sanctuary anymore.
I’m standing in white.
There’s no room around me. No hall. No landscape. Just white stretching in every direction, with no visible horizon and no gradient to mark distance. It isn’t Thirstfall. It isn’t Earth. It’s nothing.
Footsteps behind me.
I reach for Eventide.
My hand closes on air. The sheath is gone. The sword is gone. The Horizon armor is gone. I’m in my own skin wearing my own breath, and nothing else.
The footsteps keep coming.
Closer.
What the hell is happening...
"Hello, gentleman..."
I turn.
She’s materialized inches from my face. I stumble backward on instinct, hands up before I’ve decided to put them up.
She stands seven feet three, easy. Maybe more. She looks human and she isn’t. The distinction lands immediately and unmistakably, even if I couldn’t tell which detail gave it away first—because every detail does.
Skin the color of polished ivory, too smooth, too clean. Eyes that carry the shine of distant suns inside them. Hair like strands of lunar silk falling over shoulders plated in pale gold. Her robes are the most pristine fabric I’ve ever seen—white, almost translucent, following every curve without revealing them the way human fabric does. As if the cloth serves a different physics.
Six arms. Graceful. Moving in silent choreography with one another, each tracing its own slow figure in the air.
Wings unfold from her back in iridescent crystal—every feather catching a different frequency of light in a spectrum I don’t have names for.
Above her serene forehead, a halo of interlocking gears rotates at a metered tempo. Each tooth of each gear meeting the next one exactly when it should.
A crown of time, worn on a face that looks like it never has.
U-Leviathan...
My legs want to kneel. I hold them upright.
I didn’t feel her presence. I should have. A U-Leviathan should have flattened my perception the instant she arrived—pressure, weight, the animal part of my brain screaming "bigger."
There was nothing. The footsteps were a courtesy. She was already here.
I thought these things only existed in the encyclopedia.
"Ah, right. That’s what you humans call us..." Her voice lands somewhere between a spoken word and a struck bell. "Leviathan. A pretty name. Crude, but pretty."
She reads thoughts.
"Then you can read—"
"I can do many things you wouldn’t believe. But I am bound... now."
"Wait. There’s so much I need to ask. Who are you?"
"My name is Chronia. And I’m not a Leviathan." One of her six hands gestures at the rotating gears over her head. "I’m a █░░█░█░░. Guardian of the Codex."
"A what?"
"The system still holds considerable authority here, it seems." Chronia sighs.
"What are you talking about? Where are we?"
"We don’t have much time. Maintaining this space costs an immense amount of energy. And as you just heard—that isn’t the only thing I can’t say."
I force my brain to triage. Cosmic questions are a luxury. An exit strategy is not.
"Before our time runs out, how do I get out of here?"
"Hihihi," Chronia laughs behind one of six hands, the sound small and clear like wind chimes. "Normally I’d be asked something much larger. Much more singular."
"Just tell me."
She sighs. "Humans really don’t recognize their own position. That’s why you’re █░░█░█░░█░█░░█░."
She lifts one of the kinetic sculptures that had been resting on one of her arms. I hadn’t noticed it until now—and the moment her fingers close around it, the sculpture begins to spin so fast it blurs. Impossible to track.
My body freezes.
It isn’t fear and it isn’t paralysis—the signal from my brain to my limbs simply stops arriving. I’m a spectator inside my own skin.
She reaches forward. Touches one fingertip to my forehead.
Images.
They don’t play. They arrive, all at once, packed into each other like compressed memory being unpacked into a system that wasn’t designed to receive it.
A door in the back wall of Sanctuary’s main hall.
A train beyond it.
Tracks.
A rail signal lamp numbered 255.
A window of one minute exactly.
Jump at 255.
Jump precisely.
Miss the window and the train carries us back to Lost Ark.
She gave me the route out.
"Why only at that point? Why Lost Ark?"
"Lost Ark is under my protection. Signal 255 is the only position where I can open a small window for the chosen one to leave."
"Chosen? Protection?" My voice rises before I catch it. "You try to kill Lost Ark every Red Tide."
"The Red Tide is the exact moment my powers fail." Her six arms all pause at once. The gears above her forehead slow a quarter of a beat. "The system isn’t what you think. I only give them a second chance."
"And what is the system? The Codex?"
"Well. █░░█░█░░█░█░░█░█░░█░..." Chronia’s smile falters at one corner. "Oh, how annoying. It seems you’ll have to find this out on your own."
A red alarm begins flashing in my vision.
[FIREWALL ACTIVATED]
[FIREWALL ACTIVATED]
[FIREWALL ACTIVATED]
"Our time is up, Chosen One. Please—survive."
Something yanks me out of the white by the chest.
My ribs compress. My lungs collapse. A pressure the shape of a hand closes around my heart and drags me through a space that doesn’t have walls.
I’m having a heart attack.
I’m drowning on nothing.
I’m being ejected from a system that never intended me to be inside it in the first place.
How long has it been? Five minutes? Ten?
I stagger.
The sanctuary rebuilds itself around me. Marble. Blue crystal. Dust still hanging in the air from the pillar collapse. The weight of the Horizon settling onto my shoulders again. Eventide heavy on my hip. My own body re-forming around me like water poured back into a glass.
I’m on my knees. I don’t remember going down.
I’m breathing hard. Too hard. My hand is still out, fingertips inches from the altar, like I never actually touched it.
I look sideways.
"Lola... how long since I touched the crystal?"
"Uncle..." Lola scowls. "Did you drink Lunaria with alcohol behind my back?"
"Just... tell me."
She tilts her head. "Like two or three seconds."
Two or three seconds.
I close my eyes.
What was that place?
What was she?
What the hell is Thirstfall?
Everything I’ve spent decades learning about this world is rearranging itself in my skull. Pieces I thought were corners are edges. Pieces I thought were edges are somewhere else entirely.
I let out a long breath. Slow. Heavy. Processing the intel and sorting the priorities.
One thing at a time.
"Focus, Dryden," I whisper to myself, tapping my own cheek twice, lightly.
"Pillow, the uncle went loopy from touching the thing..."
Rhayne looks between us without understanding.
[You have one notification.]
Later. I dismiss the alert. Loot first.
Oliver is still being wrapped. Rhayne’s hands are steady, moving from rib to rib with the crushed leaves, working the swelling down.
I walk to the Turtarex’s carcass. The loot table usually settles next to the body after a kill of this rank.
I look down.
Ah, shit...
My heart skips a beat.
I didn’t even get to ask her about this...
Resting beside the corpse, among the other drops, is a corrupted Echo Fragment.