Chapter 90: REALITY ANCHORS
The ancient library’s air hung thick with the scent of burning incense and decaying parchment. Lania’s slender fingers trembled as she traced the fractured symbols etched across Reed’s message—geometric patterns that seemed to shift and writhe beneath her touch. Blood had dried in the corners of her eyes from the strain of deciphering the multidimensional equations. Twenty hours without rest, and still the truth eluded her.
"These aren’t just coordinates," she whispered, her voice cracking. "They’re... fragments of Reed himself."
Behind her, General Varkath’s massive frame cast a long shadow across the stone floor. The goblin commander’s flesh had continued its unsettling evolution; crystalline structures now protruded from his shoulders, catching the candlelight in prismatic bursts that mirrored the equations on the table.
"The High Council grows impatient," he rumbled, the words resonating at frequencies that made the nearby glass vessels vibrate. "Six more settlements disappeared in the night. Nothing remains but perfect geometric depressions in the earth, as though reality itself was... extracted."
Lania closed her eyes, forcing back the tears that threatened to spill. The dimensional math that Reed had transmitted burned behind her eyelids—not instructions, as they’d first believed, but warnings coded in the language of reality itself.
"We’ve been interpreting it wrong," she said, suddenly straightening. "Reed isn’t telling us how to fight the Watchers—he’s showing us how to become invisible to them."
Her fingers flew across the papers, rearranging equations with newfound clarity. "The Watchers don’t just consume realities; they digest them into their own structure. And the Voice Between harvests what remains. But Reed found a third path—neither resistance nor surrender."
She held up a parchment where the ink seemed to float above the surface. "Anchors. We need to create reality anchors."
The Obsidian Throne Room of the Fourth Domain echoed with the heated debates of the Nine Rulers. Sunlight filtered through stained glass, casting blood-red patterns across marble floors that had been pristine when the meeting began three days ago. Now they were stained with the aftermath of several "demonstrations" of the evolving goblin abilities.
Queen Merelith of the Seventh Domain retched violently as one of Varkath’s elite guards phased his arm through solid matter, emerging with a still-beating heart extracted from a condemned prisoner without breaking the skin. The goblin’s eyes—now entirely composed of swirling mathematical symbols—betrayed no emotion as the prisoner collapsed, his chest unmarked despite the fatal extraction.
"Abominations," hissed King Dorn, his weathered hand tightening around his scepter. "We fight monsters by becoming monsters?"