Threshold of Pain

Coming out of the Sunken Fields was like coming out of a long, sad dream. Over time, the overpowering sweetness and the monotonous, mournful lullaby symphony faded away, to be replaced by the more recognizable, yet eerily disturbing, ambiance of the deeper Whispering Verge. But he had been permanently changed by the furnace of experience in that golden, spiky cage of collective pain. The memory he had voluntarily given was now a palpable gap in his own memory, a persistent, dull pain that, ironically, made him more acutely aware of the forest's all-encompassing, complex grief. He now bore the tangible weight of the unsaid, unspeakable suffering of the Children's Souls; not as a crushing weight that would shatter him, but as a somber, resonant awareness that guided every deliberate step. As he understood it more thoroughly, the forest was not merely a malicious force to be cleverly outwitted, but a huge, wounded awareness, with each isolated area representing a raw, exposed aspect of its unfathomably intricate trauma.

Zen paused for a moment, keeping it well hidden, and looked at Icor's map. It showed a local area adorned with symbols that represented severe emotional instability and energetic disruptions. His teacher had given it a stark, unequivocal name: "The Keening Hills." His master's simplicity was characteristic, but it still was a frightening warning. Written in Icor's exact script, a sub-notation explained: "Avoid if possible. Reports mention persistent echoes of horrible actions, or psychological maelstroms. foundation of innate fear. With a knot of panic tightening in his stomach, Zen guessed that this was the location that the Directorate's practical event map had ominously named the "Hill of Lingering Screams." His own course, apparently dictated by a subtle but unmistakable change in the forest's stifling ambient energies after he had left the Sunken Fields, was now inevitably bringing him to this particular center of fear.

The changeover was anything from smooth. A landscape that felt not only haunted but actively, viciously tormented replaced the preceding zone's somber, almost ethereal beauty. As if scoured by some old, demonic flame, the trees, when they emerged at all, became scant and grotesquely distorted, their forms twisted and blackened. A dismal imitation of the midday it should have been, their branches clutched helplessly against a sky that had bled into a bruised, eternal dusk, like the talons of skeleton monsters. The very air became frigid, harsh, and thin. There were no soft murmurs or melancholy lullabies, but rather a faint, unnaturally high-pitched keening that appeared to go through his ears and reverberate straight into the bone marrow, a vibration that was barely audible but promised nothing but pure agony.

The terrain started to slope steeply upwards as he continued, his boots crunching on the more unstable footing. Beneath him the ground turned into a barren plain of rock and scree, dotted with sharp, obsidian-like stones that drank the dim light, radiating an uncanny chill. The predictions then started with a ruthless absence of introduction.

Unlike the phantom echoes of comfort found in the Sunken Fields, they were not dizzying illusions of bittersweet remembrance. These were unadulterated, visceral waves of unadulterated emotion that were launched with startling ferocity at his mind. First, Zen felt a surge of overwhelming fear that was so sudden and powerful that it made his knees buckle. His heart pounded against his ribs like a caged bird, causing him to gasp involuntarily. A flash of intense, phantom physical pain followed, tearing a stifled cry from him as the sound was immediately absorbed by the suffocating, waiting quiet. The torment was blinding and had no apparent cause in his own body. Then he felt a crushing, suffocating weight of humiliation, so great and absolute that he felt an almost overwhelming impulse to curl into a frail ball on the sharp rocks, to conceal his face from some invisible, all-pervading, and ruthlessly critical eye.

"No," Zen said with a hoarse rasp in the abrupt silence. In order to ground himself, he braced himself against a skeleton, burnt tree trunk. The rough, charred bark dug cruelly into his palm. Clawing for the discipline Icor had so assiduously imposed, he forced air into his rebelling lungs. Examine. Disentangle. This was not his humiliation, his anguish, or his fear. Through the mental chaos, he reasoned that these were echoes—the unprocessed psychic residue of a massive, localized pain that the forest's reactive consciousness had now amplified and brutally weaponized. In order to withstand the constant emotional assault, he used the arsenal of mental exercises that Icor had instilled in him with torturous repetition: the icily detached recitation of prime numbers, the painstaking visualization of a perfectly motionless, incomprehensible pool of dark water, and age-old methods intended to fortify his innermost thoughts.

It was a fight waged solely inside his own head against an invisible, unforgiving, and completely unrelenting attacker. The high-pitched keening became more intense, escalating from a faint vibration into a resounding roar, and now, entwined with its intolerable frequency, he could make out faint, broken screams – voices that were disembodied and suffocated with a pain and misery that was beyond human words. As in the Sunken Fields, the subconscious of this degraded section of the forest was irrevocably trapped in a never-ending, shrieking nightmare of profound violation, rather than dreaming fitfully of lost innocence.

The slope became a formidable physical obstacle as the earth became much steeper. Now he was unquestionably climbing, toward the very center of this raging mental storm, the undeniable cause of the keening. A dark, viscous seepage that shimmered faintly with an oily iridescence and emanated a sickeningly coppery, caustic scent—the obvious stench of old blood, or something immeasurably fouler—made the rocks beneath the feet dangerous. His tongue was coated in the metallic taste of primordial fear, and the air itself was heavy, thick, and nearly strangling.

He caught a glimpse of the Hill through a brief lull in the twisted, tortured shapes of the dead trees. Against the damaged canvas of the sky, it loomed before him in a bleak, empty, and completely desolate heap, its silhouette casting an air that was at once eerily accusatory and deeply melancholy. The psychic pressure flowing from its pinnacle was tremendous even from this great distance, a tangible shockwave of agony that hammered his mental barriers. It was a tangible cacophony here, a deafening chorus of silent screams made horribly manifest in the suffocating, vibrating environment, and the keening was no longer just a sound.

This was no Garden of Lost Hopes, providing a false, melancholy tranquility. This was a simple memorial to unrefined, unrepaired, and eternal suffering. Standing at its ruined entrance, Zen felt the chilling, distinct echoes of forgotten, unfathomable anguish as the chilly wind whipped his dark hair across his face. Through increasingly deeper layers of its all-pervading grief, the forest walk had brought him to what was to be its most traumatic and violent revelation in its inexplicable wisdom or cruelty. He was adamant that his abilities, compassion, and sanity would be put to the ultimate test. In this environment, the "emotional digestion" that his particular route required of him would be a feast of pure, unadulterated poison. He automatically adjusted his battered pack and its basic, well-known tools—his treasured journals, his well-maintained styluses, and the cool, smooth weight of his meditation stones—all of which felt like pitifully, almost comically, insufficient tools in the face of such immense, never-ending wailing agony.