Chapter 58: Coffin
Valens stared at the mental image of the door in his mind, looming high over the Resonance with a unique set of frequencies that felt strangely familiar. It stretched across what had been a dark emptiness before like a boundary placed in the depths of his core by unseen hands.
Fashioned from an alien alloy, it had a metallic hue, with edges battered as though worn by time. The sigil embedded on its dark metal surface wasn’t made with ink or paint; it was wrought, etched deep into the alloy itself, as if it had grown rather than been carved.
A great circular array, sprawling outward like veins from a heart, dominated the surface. At its center, a large, smooth sphere pulsed with a Resonance that tickled the edge of Valens’s senses.
Void Sphere.
It was surrounded by concentric rings, five of them, each etched with runes that blurred the moment he laid his eyes upon them, covered by fog that came out of nowhere. The same thing happened when he tried to see through the other runes. It was as though something, or someone, didn’t want him to see them yet.
Around the center, eight smaller orbs sat in a perfect ring, evenly spaced like planets caught in orbit. Each was slightly different — some were scarred, some were smooth, and others were latticed with fine cracks. They were connected to the center by a labyrinth of silvery filaments, tangled and intricate as nerve work. Some of the threads curved inward like hooks, others spiraled outward into meaningless loops.
Not random, no. Deliberate.
This design has seen magic before.
But now, save for the Void Sphere, it was dead.
The lines remained mute against his touch, flickering vainly without any frequencies.
Valens squinted, heart thumping in his chest. What he saw then made his breath still. There, in his own chest cavity, was an ancient door with a sigil that hummed not with a singular tone, but with a choir of frequencies —multiple layers of a Resonance so complex that it distorted his perception.
He could feel gravitational pull, a whisper tugging at the edge of his mind, beckoning him from beyond the door. Almost intuitively, he sent a pair of Lifesurges into the sigil, watched as the lifemana threads wormed their way across his body. When they touched the door's surface, the Resonance changed.