The air turned heavy enough to crush bone.
The fog around the Ferryman’s boots ignited into jagged veins of violet lightning, snapping across the gravel with the sound of breaking wood. The birdcage on his pole swung violently, the glowing heart inside thrashing against its iron bars as if panicking.
"You stubborn, arrogant corpse!" the Ferryman rasped, his waterlogged voice rising into a harsh, erratic screech. "You drag this region into stagnant rot while you sit in your domain! Yield your catalyst to the river! Half your power is locked away, shackled to your own soul core just to keep the corruption at bay! You are weak, Regent! Give it to me before I tear it from your chest!"
The Lady of Steel didn’t flinch. Her expression remained completely frozen, devoid of anger or exertion. Her mind was absolute, a fortress of pure iron locking the corruption down through sheer, terrifying strength of will.
She kept her pale eyes on him, cold and detached.
"You dare bare your claws in my domain, boatman?"
Dark ripples tore open in the air above her head. Dozens of them. Jagged greatswords, iron spears, and heavy halberds slid from the blackness, hovering in a wide arc behind her back. She was forging real steel directly out of Ether, holding an entire armory in place with a casual movement of her hand.
The Ferryman raised his lantern pole, his aura flaring wildly with unhinged, violent intent. A thick column of purple lightning slammed into his palm, turning the dirt beneath him into red-hot glass. The shockwave hit my chest like a kick, knocking me onto my back. Ozone filled my throat as my ears rang violently.
Aseren! Stay down! the priestess snapped in my head. Her Soul weight will tear your lungs apart!
I knew what Soul Weight was. It was one of the few parts of the power system I’d actually finished reading about.
Everyone had a Soul Weight from birth. It was innate, something tied to the soul itself, but it also grew with a person’s rank. The higher your rank, the heavier your presence became.
Normally, Soul Weight wasn’t something you noticed.
But standing in front of something like this...
Mine wasn’t even in the same league.
Whatever was in front of me carried enough Soul Weight to crush mine beneath it.
I stayed in the dirt, staring up at her through the haze.
My throat went dry as I noticed the subtle, deliberate pulse of the steel veins along her jaw. They were locked tight, straining under the quiet, invisible strain of suppressing the nightmare inside her own soul. Half her existence was dedicated to holding back a force that would ruin the region. Yet even capped at half her strength, her mind remained unbroken.
Even suppressed, she was an immovable mountain.
The Ferryman thrust his skeletal arm forward, driving the gathered lightning across the fifty-yard gap in a single blinding beam.
She stepped right into it.
Her steel-veined hand reached into the flash, her bare fingers wrapping around the raw lightning.
The ground under her feet caved in, driving a ring of shattered rock into the air, but her arm didn’t yield. Her hand didn’t burn. Her affinity was Construction, not lightning, yet her Elemental mastery was so absurdly dense that she forced his element to obey her rules. She squeezed her grip, grinding the wild electricity until it groaned, bending the plasma into a sharp, rigid arrow of solid purple light.
The Ferryman went completely still. The weeping eye-slits on his mask flickered.
She raised the solidified lightning over her shoulder, her pale eyes fixed on him.
"A king does not ask permission from the storm to rule," she said, her voice easily cutting through the thunder. "I am the iron that grounds the sky."
She threw it.
The lightning arrow crossed the distance in an instant.
There was no time to follow its path, only the thunderous impact as it tore through the Ferryman’s chest and hurled him down the mountain path. His body had barely left the ground when the iron blades behind her moved.
Dozens of them descended like a storm of falling stars, their edges screaming through the air as they surged after him.
The steel spears and greatswords pinned his body to the cliff face, driving deep into the stone one after another. The impact shook the entire ridge, raining rock and dust over us.
The Ferryman hung there, nailed to the rock wall like a shattered insect. Black bile and water erupted from beneath his mask, his body twitching violently against the iron spikes. The unshakeable composure in his voice dissolved into pure, raw terror.
"W-Wait—s-stop—!" he gasped, his raspy voice breaking into a panicked, wet gurgle as his existence fractured. "T-The toll—the river... I—I cannot... y-you can’t—!"
A wet, sickening crunch echoed from his chest as the remaining blades settled deeper into the rock.
"N-No... N-NO—!"
His lantern pole fell, shattering on the gravel. The caged heart inside gave one final, violent spasm, bursting into a puddle of black sludge, and the faint blue light behind his weeping eye-slits went completely dark.
She gave the Ferryman one last glance, as though confirming that he was no longer worth her attention.
Then she turned to me.
Her footsteps crossed the scorched earth without hurry. Behind her, the weapons she had summoned dissolved into fragments of silver light, fading before they could touch the ground.
The pressure around us ebbed with her.
It was subtle at first. The crushing weight on my chest loosened. The air returned to my lungs. Even the storm seemed to lose its voice.
She walked into the smoke.
Her figure blurred at the edges, swallowed piece by piece by the drifting haze. Pale hair vanished first. Then the outline of her face. Only those cold, white-blue eyes remained, watching me through the veil.
For a heartbeat, I felt as though I was looking into the depths of an endless winter.
Then she blinked.
The fog closed.
When it parted again, there was nothing there.
Only the scorched earth remained, and the silence of the mountain.
I finally managed to breathe.
My chest heaved as cold mountain air finally rushed back into my lungs, burning like ice. I stayed on my knees for a second, my hands dug deep into the wet gravel, just trying to convince my body that I wasn’t being crushed to death anymore.
My pants were cold and soaked through. The humiliation hit me now that the sheer, blinding terror had receded, but I didn’t care enough to dwell on it. I was alive.
Beside me, Aurelia and Sir Richard were still out cold in the dirt. Thomas and the other guard lay motionless nearby, their breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches.
I forced myself up, my legs shaking like weak saplings. My boots dragged through the scorched dirt as I turned toward the cliff face.
With the iron swords already dissolved into silver dust, the Ferryman’s broken body sat slumped in a heap against the base of the shattered stone. His cloak was shredded, black water and foul bile pooling around him in slow, thick streams. The blue light behind his mask was gone, but as I got closer, I heard it.
A tiny, wet twitching sound.
It was faint, coming from deep within his ruined torso. The heart inside him hadn’t died. It was still pulsing, fighting to stitch his fractured existence back together. Horrors at this rank didn’t stay dead just because their bodies were ruined.
I reached down and pulled Mercy from the pouch. The heavy iron cleaver felt leaden in my hand, my wrist trembling from exhaustion, but I didn’t stop.
I stepped up to his motionless form. Up close, he smelled like stagnant swamp water and old copper.
"Nothing personal," I rasped, my voice barely working.
I raised the heavy cleaver with both hands and drove the notched iron straight into his chest, right into the center of the writhing core.
The entity gave one last, violent convulsion. A terrible, silent shudder ran through his entire frame, and then the dark water leaking from his coat simply stopped. The remaining weight of his presence vanished completely, evaporating into thin air.
Inside his chest, the black heart dissolved, melting down into a thick, glowing liquid that seeped straight into the steel of my blade and surged up my arm.
The pale ring on my finger burned white-hot.
[Living Pact: Hearts of the Four Regents]
Progress: 2/4
────────────────
Ether Absorbed
+350 Ether
Living Pact Fee
−100 Ether (Transportation)
Ether Furnace Capacity
425 / 1000 → 675 / 1000
────────────────
Heart Obtained
+1 Regent’s Heart
A rush of dense, icy Ether flooded my Soul Furnace, violently expanding my capacity until my temples throbbed. The pain lasted only a second before settling into a deep, humming warmth in the center of my chest.
I pulled the cleaver free with a wet suction sound. The empty, ragged coat collapsed flat onto the rocks like an old pile of wet rags.
A low groan echoed behind me.
Sir Richard was stirring in the dirt, coughing violently as he pushed himself up onto one elbow. Aurelia blinked open her glassy eyes a second later, gasping for air as if she’d just surfaced from deep water.
"Aseren...?" she whimpered, her hands shivering as she looked around at the scorched, ruined plateau. "Where... where did she go?"
I wiped the edge of my cleaver against my coat and slipped it back into the pouch.
"She left," I said, walking back down the gravel slope toward them. "Get up. We aren’t staying here."
We stayed in that freezing stone alcove while the crimson fog bled into pitch black.
No one bothered with a fire. Sir Richard sat propped against the rock wall, his face hollow, staring into nothing. Thomas and the other guard were slumped together like empty armor, their hands resting limp over their scabbards.
Aurelia sat curled on a flat stone, hugging her knees to her chest. Her teeth were clicking together, a soft, pathetic sound in the quiet.
"Saint Aldren’s monastery is right through the pass," she said, her voice cracking. She didn’t look up. "If the Shepherd is down there... if he’s like her... what are we even doing?"
"Trying to survive," I said from the cave mouth. My voice was dry, scraping out of my throat like sandpaper. "Sitting here waiting to freeze isn’t going to change a damn thing."
Sir Richard let out a harsh, wet laugh that turned into a cough. "You’re a strange kid. You look at something that turned the sky to iron, and you just keep moving."
"I was terrified," I said, my jaw clenching so hard my molars groaned. "I couldn’t move my legs. Is that what you want to hear? We’re all alive because she didn’t give a shit about us. That’s the only reason."
The cave went quiet again. The wind outside whistled through the jagged rocks, sharp and cold.
You lie so terribly, the priestess whispered inside my head, her tone dripping with quiet delight. You’re still shaking.
I squeezed my eyes shut, digging my fingernails into my palms until the skin split. Shut up.
The Ether I’d ripped from the Ferryman’s core was still settling in my chest, a thick, heavy heat pulsing through my veins. It kept the freezing mountain air from killing me, but it did nothing for the hollow, sick feeling in my stomach.
I looked down at my hands. They were caked in dry mud and black, waterlogged blood from his chest. Two Regents down. Two left.
"Sleep," I told them, turning my back to the dark interior and staring out into the fog. "We move the second the path opens up."
***
My knees gave out. I slid down the granite wall and hit the dirt with a quiet thud, resting the cleaver across my lap. Exhaustion settled into my skull like lead, heavier than the cold, heavier than the reek of stagnant water clinging to my coat.
When my eyes shut, the wind stopped.
I was eight years old on the front porch back home. The air smelled like cut grass and warm asphalt after a summer rain.
"Aseren, look!"
Nia ran up the wooden steps, her shoes squeaking on the damp boards, holding her cupped hands out to me. She had a scraped bandaid peeling off her left knee and grass stains on her elbows.
"I caught it! See?"
She parted her fingers just enough for me to see a small yellow butterfly fluttering inside. She was beaming, her dark eyes wide and full of life before the hospital beds, before the medical bills, before I ruined everything.
"Don’t open your hands," I told her, my voice small and thin. "It’ll fly away."
"It’s supposed to," she laughed, throwing her hands wide.
The butterfly went up into the sky, but the blue faded instantly, turning into ash. The warm air turned freezing. Nia’s face blurred, her bright eyes collapsing inward until she was just a hollow mask leaking black water into the dirt.
I snapped awake, my chest hitching as I gasped for air.
My hand slammed onto the handle of my cleaver before my eyes even focused. The alcove was still pitch dark. A few feet away, Richard was snoring faintly, his rough blanket pulled up to his chin, while Aurelia curled on her side with her hands tucked near her throat.
I wiped a cold sweat from my forehead, staring out at the mist creeping along the cave floor.
But my fingers wouldn’t stop twitching.
***
"Bad dream?"
Aurelia’s voice came quietly from the back wall. She was sitting up with her chin resting on her knees, watching me through the dark.
"Something like that," I muttered, my thumb tracing the notch on my cleaver.
She pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders. "You were talking in your sleep. Nia?"
I stiffened, keeping my eyes on the fog outside. "Nobody."
"I had a younger sister," she said softly. "Died during the first blight when I was six. My dad said she went to the Garden of Lights, but I knew she just stopped breathing. First time I realized how pointless titles were."
She quieted down for a second, searching my face. "How old are you, Aseren?"
"Nineteen," I said.
This body was, anyway. On Earth, before I got pulled into this mess, I was twenty-seven. My life back there was pretty depressing. I lost both my mom and dad young, so I had to raise Nia completely on my own. It was a constant grind with hospital bills and family debt, but I loved that kid more than anything, and I eventually pulled us out of the dirt and made a decent life. Now I was sitting here, wrapped in a teenager’s skin, and all of it felt completely useless.
"Me too," she murmured. "It’s just weird. You’re my age, but you act totally detached. Where are you even from? What continent?"
My brain stalled.
What do I even say? That I’m from another world entirely? That I was living in a quiet apartment before I woke up here?
"Far away," I muttered. "Doesn’t matter."
Aurelia didn’t push it, but she didn’t look away either. "It’s not just where you’re from. It’s how you act. You do stuff that freaks me out, Aseren."
"Like what?"
"Like crawling into that spider nest with a butcher cleaver and not even shaking," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Or standing in front of the Lady of Steel without screaming. When you went back to cut open the Ferryman, you were whispering to yourself and laughing. Your hands were covered in black gunk and you just stared right through him like he was a piece of wood. Anyone else would be throwing up or screaming. You just... turn off."
I stared down at my hands in the dark, the dry black crust still stuck under my fingernails.
Ah... so I’m starting to do things without even realizing it.
My stomach sank. Is this the consequence of becoming a Horror? How long do I have until I’m not me anymore? Until I start doing things without realizing it, until I can’t tell what’s real and what’s in my head?
"I’m just trying to keep us alive," I said, my voice sounding flat even to my own ears.
Aurelia rested her cheek against her knees and looked back toward the fog. "I know. Just... be careful. We’ll eventually get home."
What is home?
Is it the earth beneath my feet? The place where I was born? The people I left behind?
I used to think I knew the answer, but now that I reached for that feeling, it wasn’t there. Earth was still Earth. My memories were still mine. Yet the urge to return had simply disappeared, because I had given it away.
Maybe home was never a place. Maybe it was simply wherever your heart wanted to return to.
And if I no longer wanted to return anywhere, then what was home to me? I wasn’t sure.
But I still had something to hold onto. At least, I thought I did.
I needed to return to my world.
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