Chapter 53: Wretched Mother
[You’ve entered a Cursed Rift. Shadows loom in its depths.]
The moment Valens passed through the door and entered the space beyond, he was met with a System notification that appeared out of nowhere. Though he didn’t need to be reminded how ominous this place felt through his sound vision, getting an extra message only further enhanced that sensation.
Considering the captain and others hardly reacted, I guess it’s not strange.
He waved it off and peered out into the distance, where an alien landscape welcomed them. A desolate land sloping ever so sharply further ahead, dotted by rocks jutting out of the dead earth, their tips catching the moonlight blinking from between the dark clouds overhead.
It smelled of sulfur and wet soil, mixed with a stench of decay so sharp that Valens had to manage a Blockage around his mouth once again. The poison that caught the Miners senseless was plenty in this place. Plenty, as in, it clung to the edges of the protruding rocks like an eternal shroud.
I don’t like this.
“As expected from a Cursed Rift,” Garran broke the silence as the door blinked out of existence just behind them, vanishing from Valens’s senses as though it’d been a lie. “It has a sick way of welcoming people.”
“That’s normal, right?” Valens had to ask when the Templars didn’t give any reaction to their only exit’s sudden disappearance, pointing at the place where the door was just visible a second before. “Tell me we didn’t lose our only exit?”
Am I going to get stuck in a Rift… again?
“Easy. There’s always an exit if you know how to search for one,” Garran said to him, then turned to the captain. “This doesn’t look like a small operation, captain. I can’t feel the Sun’s Blessing, either.”
“A dark deal indeed,” Captain Edric’s voice was heavy as he leaned over his sword. “This place looks like a bad replica of Broken Lands. A small pocket of it, at least.”
“Save for the fog,” Garran said.