Chapter 55: What the Night Takes
The Night Guest was not measured with strength. Leon stared at Lyra's back for a moment, letting the conceptual weight of her words settle into his mind before Maya asked the question he had already been thinking.
"What does that mean?"
Lyra's mount continued running across the red snow, its massive hooves kicking crimson powder into the freezing air. Far behind them, the Stone Skin people were still moving through the same endless landscape, anchoring their rear. As long as that remained true, the physical distance between them provided another useful layer of tactical protection.
"It means asking how strong the Night Guest is doesn't tell you anything useful," Lyra said, her voice dropping into a serious register over the wind. "Cultivation realms measure the amount of power a cultivator can command. The Night Guest does not behave like a cultivator."
Leon narrowed his eyes, his hyper-intuition probing the physics of her answer. "So it's a phenomenon?"
"Maybe. Some say beast, others say curse. I also heard people say it's a tool of fate or a balancing mechanism of the world. This led to some people calling it a force of nature but most think it's an evil entity."
Maya frowned, her brow furrowing under her winter hood. "You really don't know?"
Lyra glanced back over her shoulder, her feathers shifting beneath her cloak. "Nobody knows."
The blunt answer and that stark transparency was what made Leon take the threat seriously. Lyra had been exceptionally precise about almost everything since they met; she could explain cultivation, Sage Arts, beasts, formations, and the geography of the Frost Expanse without a fraction of hesitation. Even when she lacked an absolute answer, she usually possessed enough knowledge to estimate one. This was entirely separate.
"There closest thing we have to a record of encounters is extremely old that we don't even know its origins." she continued, her focus returning to the path ahead.
Leon waited for a beat. "Which is?"
Lyra was silent for several paces, the steady rhythm of the beast's run anchoring the quiet. "The closest thing we have to a record is a lullaby."
Maya blinked in surprise. "A lullaby?"
"A poem sung to children," Lyra's voice remained perfectly calm. "It teaches them to fear the Night Guest. Children are told that when the sun disappears they must remain inside their homes."
Leon looked toward the distant horizon, analyzing the structural transmission of the lore. "So everyone grows up knowing the legend."
"Yes."
"Because of the lullaby."
"Because of the lullaby."
Leon considered the parameters of the tradition. "What does it say?"
Lyra hesitated, her grip tightening slightly on the leather reins. "I don't remember all of it."
Maya raised an eyebrow. "You don't?"
"I was not particularly interested in children's songs. " Lyra muttered flatly.
That rare defensive answer earned a quiet, unexpected laugh from Adrian. "I believe that."
Lyra ignored his comment completely, pressing forward. "The meaning is simple. The Night Guest comes at night. Hide in your homes and keep the candles burning. Don't peek outside for those who see it will never return home."
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Leon looked back at her profile. "Never?"
"Never," there was no structural ambiguity in her answer. "The Night Guest has only two outcomes," Lyra's expression hardened into a military scowl. "It kills you, or you get teleported."
Leon frowned. "So if there are survivors shouldn't there be more information?"
"They aren't really survivors," Lyra stated.
Maya's eyes showed worry, her fingers locking around the saddle.
Lyra continued her breakdown of the phenomenon. "Anyone transported by the Night Guest loses their memories. Completely. They don't remember their family, their home, their name, their cultivation—nothing. So even if someone finds them, they won't know who they are, and no one knows where they came from."
The terrifying implications settled heavily over the group. There could be no witness, no reliable testimony, and no surviving cultivator capable of describing what the Night Guest looked like, where it lived, how it moved, or what it wanted. Someone encountered it, and then they were either dead or gone; and if they were ever found again years later, they were effectively an entirely separate person.
Maya's voice was noticeably quieter when she finally spoke. "Then how do people even know it exists?"
Lyra looked toward the distant red horizon. "Because people disappear. When groups encounter the Night Guest half would die and have the purple internal traces with the skull mark where the heart should be. The other half is gone and whoever gets found years later doesn't remember anything. Over generations people connected it."
That was all. Villages remembered missing fathers, families remembered children who never came home, travelers vanished from roads, and hunters failed to return from the forest. Sometimes, years later, an individual would be found wandering in a distant province with zero memory of their former life. The stories accumulated, the lullaby remained, and the legend survived.
Leon leaned back slightly against the mount, his mind running the historical math. That explained why there were no proper records or technical manuals; the Night Guest didn't merely prevent people from learning its secrets, its very existence naturally erased the individuals capable of documenting them.
"So running is the safest option," Leon concluded.
Lyra nodded. "Running is the only option that might work."
"Might?"
"It only works sometimes."
Leon almost let out a brief, sarcastic laugh. "That's not reassuring."
"This is the nightmare that terrorizes the entire continent. Just 40 years ago there was an incident where a village had an oil shortage as a result the entire village experienced the final night of their lives. An entire silent village with no signs of struggle. Wiped off the map in 1 night." Lyra replied.
Maya gave Leon a quick, sideways look. "You had to ask?"
"I know, it's creepy."
For a few seconds, the high-stakes tension between the saddles eased. The mounts continued their steady march toward the frontier outpost, the red horizon stretching endlessly ahead of them as the crimson snow reflected the strange light of the Frost Expanse.
Leon glanced backward over his shoulder. The Stone Skin challengers were still maintaining their position, far enough away that they posed no immediate physical threat while their collective speed kept the distance widening slowly. Good. As long as that sitiuation held, the group possessed something approaching baseline safety.
His attention returned inward, the familiar feeling of Qi filling his empty meridians reminding him of his ongoing bottleneck. Self Cultivation. His progress had completely stalled; he had already reached the absolute peak of what his current understanding allowed, yet the next developmental step remained completely inaccessible. He still didn't know what he was missing. He had tried understanding himself, he had tried naming his principles, and he had tried constructing his own path from the pieces he already possessed, but none of it had been enough.
Leon frowned, letting his hyper-intuition re-evaluate the data. Perhaps the problem wasn't that he hadn't understood himself; perhaps he had entirely misunderstood what the next requirement was. The thought lingered, but he didn't pursue it—not yet. There were more immediate problems to solve.
Maya looked toward the front mount again. "Thank you."
Lyra glanced back, her expression neutral. "For what?"
"For telling me."
Lyra studied her face for a moment, her military mask returning. "I still don't completely trust you."
"I know."
"But I care about you," Lyra said quietly.
Maya smiled faintly. "I care about you too."
"But those aren't the same thing."
"mmm" Maya looked down at her reins. "I know."
Lyra faced forward again, and that boundary seemed to be enough to stabilize their dynamic. Leon watched them for a silent moment before returning his attention to the red horizon. The Night Guest remained something they couldn't comprehend, the Stone Skin people remained behind them, and the frontier outpost was ahead; for now, that was enough. They continued riding through the crimson snow.