When the hum of the scanners died down a little, I carefully raised my face above the surface of the dirty water.
It felt as if my lungs were packed to the brim with crushed glass.
The air, after the icy bog, felt scorching, as if I were breathing over an open blast furnace.
"Ephraim..." I exhaled, immediately breaking into a dry, hacking cough.
My voice turned into a pathetic wheeze, which the whisper of the dry reeds instantly swallowed. I pulled my knees up with difficulty and reached for my chest.
Under the soaking wet jacket, the crystal was pulsating like a living, heavily wounded heart. Before my mind's eye, right over the cloudy landscape of the marshes, toxic green lines popped up:
[WARNING: The path is corrupted.]
[Transition to hidden mark. Convergence of sparks: status "UNDEFINED".]
[External interference detected.]
"Shut up... just shut up!" I grabbed my head with my hands, feeling the veins beating furiously under my cold fingers.
I forced myself to move. Crawled through the thickets, clenching my teeth.
The sharp edges of the sedge cut my numb palms. The boots, full of icy sludge, weighed a ton each, and the bog squelched, trying to suck me back to the bottom.
And strangely enough, in this rhythm of pain, an absurd thought pierced me.
How do I understand the local language?
But because of the exhaustion, I don't have time for this right now; it's better to conserve my strength.
I'll leave the formal analysis for later.
A hundred meters later, I found him.
Ephraim lay face down in the thick, intertwined thickets of thorny bog raspberry. His long cloak was burnt, exposing charred rune patches on the lining, and the fingers of his right hand held a death grip on a shard of black mirror.
The shard was smeared with something dark and sticky.
"How are you?" I collapsed into the mud next to him, feeling that the limit of my strength had been passed.
The old man slowly, with a hoarse groan, rolled onto his back.
His face was as pale as chalk.
"Quiet, idiot..." he hissed, barely moving his lips. "The Hound dropped the 'Seal of the Scream.' They are listening to every splash within a mile radius. If you start whining now, they'll seed this square with shrapnel bolts."
With a muffled growl, he slumped onto his side, convulsively gripping his left shoulder.
Only now did the nauseating, sweetish stench of burnt meat reach me.
"Did it catch you bad?" I whispered just with my lips.
"Nonsense... burned right to the meat," Ephraim squeezed out a pathetic likeness of a smirk, even though his eyes were watering from pain. "I've had worse. But you..."
He broke off, staring at my chest.
"What's with the crystal? You're glowing too brightly, they'll see you even in the blind Mirrors of Truth."
"It won't calm down," I whispered, feeling my teeth starting to ache from the stone's vibration. "And it... it's talking to me. In Zeno's voice."
Ephraim froze. His hand, reaching for the flask on his belt, stopped halfway.
"What exactly did he say?" Ephraim's voice became dry. "Word for word, kid. It's important."
"That you are not the way out," "And that I need to get to some node where three forces converge."
I've already told you, enough with the riddles! Why is your stone warning me about you? What are you hiding?
The old man didn't answer.
Instead, he began to get up onto his knees with difficulty, wincing from the smell of his own burnt flesh. The familiar whistling hum swept over the marshes again—the Spheres were changing position, their Beams of Revelation burning away the fog closer and closer to our cover, turning the gray haze into boiling steam.
"If we don't leave through the Dead Loop right now, you'll never know," he threw out sharply, ignoring my questions. "The crystal has activated the soul imprint of its previous owner. Your veins are already rearranging themselves to the artifact's pattern, Iron. Do you feel that itch? It's a code looking for a new server."
He grabbed me by my good shoulder and yanked me toward him.
"If we don't dump the excess of this energy into the damp earth through the drain, in an hour you will become an empty shell for someone else's mind. Is that what you want?"
We moved toward the ancient drain that Ephraim called the "Dead Loop."
There, where I had previously seen ordinary bog hummocks and fallen trunks, ghostly, glowing grids were now showing through. I saw the trails of burned ether left by the Spheres in the sky, like the contrails of airplanes, and the pulsating veins of traps under the water, resembling minefields in augmented reality.
"Don't believe what you see!" Ephraim yelled when I froze once again, trying to bypass an 'invisible' wall of system interference. "It's the stone's mirage! It's scanning your fears and superimposing them onto reality!"
"...Ephraim is lying. He has always lied. The crystal is your freedom, and he is your cage. Your jailer..."
Zeno's voice thundered in my head so loudly that I stumbled and collapsed face-first into the cold slush.
Tears spurted from my eyes, mixing with the mud. My mind was tearing apart: one part of me saw a wounded, exhausted old man who was dragging me along, and the other saw a system threat, an obstacle that needed to be eliminated.
"He says you're lying!" I roared into the emptiness, digging my fingers into the silt. "What did you do to Zeno?! Why is he locked in this damn piece of hardware?!"
Ephraim turned sharply and backhanded me across the face.
A ringing, stinging pain momentarily broke through the shroud of hallucinations.
I froze, pressing my palm to my burning cheek.
"If you don't shut up right now, I'll leave you here!" Ephraim loomed over me, and in his gaze, I saw despair. "Zeno tried to save himself and make sure you were alive. And... he almost succeeded. But right now he is fragmented code, Iron! Do you want the same fate? Then keep listening to him!"
He yanked me up by the scruff of my neck.
"We are almost there. Either you take control of your brains, or it will burn out your personality. Decide. Now."
"Let's go," I exhaled, forcing myself to stand up.
We reached a high concrete wall—the remnants of some hydro-structure. But our path was blocked by a Sentinel Obelisk. A massive tower with rotating lenses was slowly combing the area with a white Beam of Revelation, and I could feel the air around it trembling from the colossal tension.
"We can't get through," Ephraim exhaled, pressing down to the concrete. "The crystal is tearing the etheric balance to pieces."
The Obelisk has already registered the disturbance. If the beam touches us directly, the system will set the 'Erasure' mark.
I looked at the tower. It appeared before me as a complex pulsating structure of vulnerable connections.
The voice in my head whispered sequences of impulses.
"...input vector... frequency 0.44... open the circuit..."
"You have to open up," Ephraim grabbed me by the shoulders, his fingers digging painfully into my collarbones. "Completely. Direct all this uncontrollable discharge at the tower. Burn out their rune bindings before they burn us out!"
"But you yourself said that it would consume me!" I tried to pull away, but the old man held tight.
"Use the Covenant of the Shadow!" he shouted over the growing hum of the Obelisk. "Zeno will guide you! He knows the protocols! Just believe."
I looked at the top of the tower.
The Obelisk's lens was slowly turning in our direction, flaring up with an unbearable white light. There was no time left to think.
I closed my eyes and, shuddering inwardly, threw my mind wide open.
"Covenant... of the Shadow..." I whispered.
The cold vanished. The pain vanished. Only the lines remained.
I reached out my hand and "crossed out" the tower from reality, directing the crystal's accumulated energy into a single point.
The flash was of such force that the sky over the marshes seemed to split in two. A blinding green dome consumed the Obelisk.
In the next second, the massive structure drowned in a fountain of emerald sparks.
Then came a ringing silence.
The energy was gone, leaving behind only a scorched emptiness.
I collapsed onto the concrete, feeling my consciousness slipping through my fingers like sand.
"Run..." I heard Ephraim's distant, muffled voice.
I tried to lean on my arms, but they were like cotton. My face ended up inches from a dirty puddle that had pooled in a pothole in the concrete.
For a moment, my vision cleared.
In the reflection, it wasn't my face looking back at me.
From the cloudy water, through the ripples and the dirt, Zeno was looking back at me.
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