13-5. Wrung Dry
“This is newer,” Elijah said, kneeling next to a wall. It only rose a few feet above the ground, and it ended after a length of ten feet. The surface had been worn smooth by the elements, though there was enough scoring to hint that it had once been highly decorative. There were also a couple of depleted crystals embedded into the stone. “It seems curved to me.”
“Then it probably is,” Benedict said.
In the past month, he’d recovered significantly, though he still wasn’t strong enough to completely care for himself. In a normal scenario, he would have been fine. But Elijah’s mandate to keep moving meant that Benedict often found himself in the familiar position of being strapped to Elijah’s back.
And he liked it no more now than he had in the very beginning, though there was now a note of resignation to his demeanor that kept him from complaining. For the most part, he just remained silent and sullen.
Not a surprising reaction to their situation.
Over the past few weeks, they’d encountered more hints at the excised world’s former civilization, though almost every sign pointed to the natives being long dead. Or worse, transformed into monsters by the touch of the abyss. As far as Elijah could tell, that was the fate awaiting anyone who succumbed to its influence.
That made his own exhaustion that much more frightening.
Because with every passing day, he found it increasingly difficult to maintain his Mantle of Authority. He didn’t dare sleep, for fear that it would deactivate the moment he fell unconscious. His body could keep going for months more, but despite that, he knew that sleep was necessary, even for him. Instead of exhausting his physical form, the lack of rest affected his mind. Of late, he’d found it almost impossible to focus on anything other than rote repetition, and in his more lucid moments, he knew it would only get worse.
It wasn’t as if he had much of a choice, though.
There was no respite from the constant pressure of the abyss. It had left his Mantle of Authority frayed and trembling, and his soul ached with every pulse of ethera flowing through it. He likened it to the broken ribs he’d suffered in his youth. The injury itself wasn’t nearly as debilitating as some others he’d experienced, but the pain had been constant. Every single breath, every movement came with a sharp stab of agony.
Even sitting still and restricting himself to shallow breaths had done nothing to help him escape the pain.
So it was with the corruption’s effect on his Mantle of Authority, which, at its most basic level, was just an outward expression of his soul.
“I think it was a circle,” Elijah said, ignoring the other man’s petulant tone, just as he’d resolve to ignore the constant pain that came with the corrosion of his mantle. He pointed a few hundred feet away to another length of wall. From a distance, the curve seemed more pronounced. “See that one?”
“No.”
Elijah sighed, then turned so Benedict could lay eyes on the stand of wall. “See it now?”
“Yes. It’s curved,” Benedict stated.
“What do you think of it?”
“I don’t know, Elijah,” Benedict sighed. “Maybe it was once a ritual circle. Or perhaps these people just liked building in circles. With how eroded everything is, there is literally no way to tell.”
Elijah frowned.
“Do you want to walk for a while?” he asked after a few more minutes.
“What’s the point?”
“You need to recover your strength.”
“No. Not that. I’m asking why we’re still going,” he countered. “It’s hopeless. We’re not going to find anything to help us. This world has been abandoned. Or everyone who lived here is long dead. There’s nothing left.”
“There might be.”
“Even if there is, there’s almost no way we’ll find it,” Benedict argued. Then, he pointed off in the distance. “The clue we need to survive might be that way.” He shifted so he could gesture in the opposite direction. “Or it might be that way. It could be buried a few hundred feet under the ground, for all we know.”
“And?”
“I’m saying that we’re walking just to walk. We’re moving because you don’t know what else to do.”
Elijah didn’t argue with him because he knew just how right Benedict was. He had no idea what he was doing, other than surviving. There was no real rhyme or reason to his decisions, save the ones that kept him alive. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t know why he was going there. And he definitely had no idea what he expected to happen even if he arrived at his unknowable destination.
Finally, he asked, “Do you have a better idea?”
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“I…I don’t.”
“Then stop being negative,” Elijah ordered.
“But –”
“I said to give it a rest, Benedict,” Elijah cut him off, and more sharply than he really intended. He took a deep breath, then added, “Please.”
And the other man complied, though he sunk even further into his sullenness. That was better than the constant reminders that they had no real direction. Neither of them had any clue what they were doing. But Elijah knew the value of putting one foot in front of the other. So long as he continued to survive – to act, even if it had no real purpose – he could keep going.
If he stopped, even for a little while, he would succumb to the hopelessness of their situation.
With that in mind, he continued to study his surroundings, and after a few more hours, he was convinced that the structure had once been a series of walls arranged in concentric circles. The precision of it definitely supported the ritual circle idea, though without visible runes, it was impossible to say for certain. And the effects of erosion had robbed them of that.
Once Elijah had exhausted that particular well of information, he moved on.
They’d left the mountains behind only a week before, but the terrain had gotten no less treacherous in their wake. The rocky ground was pitted and streaked by hundreds of deep fractures. A few days later, he discovered the source.
Kneeling at the edge of a crater, Elijah asked, “Do you think it was a meteor?”
From where he was sitting nearby, Benedict responded with a succinct, “No.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“No.”
“Do it anyway.”
Benedict sighed, then pushed himself to his feet. His legs trembled, but he managed to walk a few steps to the edge of the crater. It sloped downward at a steep angle, exposing glittering black sand before, hundreds of yards away, a roiling lake of liquid corruption rested.
It wasn’t the first time they had seen such a phenomenon. In fact, most of the pockmarked terrain featured much smaller pools. Elijah had spent an entire day examining the first they encountered, only to realize that it was mostly water. However, it was inextricably intertwined with the same abyssal corruption that suffused everything else on the planet.
In some cases, it played host to much smaller but no less dangerous monsters. Most of them were twisted into eldritch horrors, each one a little different from the last. The only common thread between them was that they were uniformly aggressive, and they were just as likely to attack one another as they were to come after Elijah or Benedict.
But seeing the smaller creatures gave Elijah some insight into their natures.
At their most basic level, they were still biological creatures. Though, distressingly, they lacked the thread of nature that flowed through every animal, plant, or fungi. There were still bits and pieces in there. Like shattered glass. But it had no effect on the monsters themselves.
Instead, it was replaced by a fundamental drive to consume.
Never stopping.
All-encompassing.
It was the throughline connecting every single creature Elijah encountered on the excised planet. Given that, it was easy to see why the system cut off such planets. The danger of the abyss was too great. If it was allowed to gain a foothold, it could easily spread from one planet to the next, consuming everything until it threatened the World Tree itself.
Of course, it would need to be much more powerful than a few tadpole-sized monsters who lived, fought, and died in a small puddle on a forgotten planet. But that wasn’t difficult to imagine, either.
The real question was whether or not the Ravener was the cause or just another effect of a naturally-occurring phenomenon.
Elijah had no answer to that query, and Benedict was no help at all.
That was not to say that the Warlock had entirely given up. When it came time to fight, he contributed as much as he could. However, with his continued weakness, there wasn’t a lot he could do.
Elijah tried to help his companion as much as possible, but the injury was not physical. Instead, the man’s entire soul had been shattered by the plummet through the abyssal well. The only reason he didn’t immediately die was because Elijah had saved him.
And he was grateful for that. He said as much on more than one occasion. However, the pervasive hopelessness of their circumstances always returned to smother any positivity.
Never was that more obvious than when they were standing next to that crater and staring at the roiling lake of corruption.
Elijah didn’t need to get closer to know that there were monsters in there. He could feel them, all fighting for prominence. All hunting and devouring one another in an endless cycle. Some of them were strong enough that they could swat Elijah like a fly.
Which was a grim reminder that he was no longer in a curated space like a Primal Realm. No artificial limits. No guarantees that all problems had a solution. It was the real world, and with all the dangers such a setting implied. One small step in the wrong direction, and he might find himself staring at a late-stage demi-god.
And not a hollow one like what he’d found in the Primal Realms. For all that those creatures had the power of a demi-god, they’d lacked some all-important factor. It was only now that Elijah realized what it was.
Those entities were governed by the spirits of volunteers. Some might have reached the later stages of progression. They might have even shared some similarities with the roles they’d been given. But they hadn’t lived with that nature for years. Even a subtle difference in attunement could rob the end result of power.
It was like shoving a child into the body of an elite athlete. There was absolutely no way they could replicate the experience of growing with that body, and as a result, they could never achieve their true potential.
In the instance of the Primal Realms, the creatures inside were still deadly enough, but Elijah was convinced that real demi-gods would put them to shame.
In any case, it was a grim reminder of just how precarious their situation truly was. Not only was his mantle becoming increasingly frayed, but there were unknown dangers out there. Dangers that had the power to destroy him utterly.
After observing the lake for a while, Elijah and Benedict returned to their destination-less journey. The thing was at least twenty miles wide, which meant it took them a while to circle its circumference. But they managed it all the same, eventually finding their way through the series of ravines and pits and to an open plain.
Two more days found them fighting against a pack of misshapen monsters that resembled baboons. Aside from the obvious differences, at least. But beneath those tentacles, extra arms and multitude of faces, Elijah could see the basic shape.
Whatever the case, fighting them off was what pushed Elijah over the edge.
He barely managed to deploy the tent before finally collapsing into unconsciousness. The weight of the past two months – and the previous year, most of which had been inside the Labyrinth of Dead Gods – had finally caught up to him.
Just before he passed out, he used the last of his willpower to clamp down on his Mantle of Authority in the hopes that it wouldn’t dissipate while he slept. Hopefully, that would work, because he surrendered to the darkness only a few seconds later.