Into the Dark

The lock clicked open under my touch. Five nights of watching guard rotations, five nights of feeling the crystalline patterns under my skin pulse with increasing urgency. Whatever was happening to me, confinement made it worse.

Grace perched on my shoulder as I gathered my medical supplies from the storage room. She'd been visiting through the window bars, and tonight she'd sung something different. Something that made the metal warm under my fingers.

The corridor stretched empty ahead. Two bells past midnight, just like every night. Fifteen minutes until the next patrol.

I walked through shadows that seemed deeper than they should be, following paths my changed vision could see clearly. The Guild complex felt different now. Smaller. As if the walls couldn't quite contain what I was becoming.

The dome barrier recognized something in my crystalline patterns and parted like water. I stepped through into the corrupted wilderness, leaving the city's protective glow behind.

◇◇◇◇

Day after day, I walked.

The landscape shifted around me. Plants with geometric leaves that hurt to look at. Streams flowing uphill when I wasn't watching directly. Ground that sometimes felt solid, sometimes revealed depths that shouldn't exist.

Grace sang constantly now, her voice the only thing that kept the corrupted air from burning my lungs. The crystalline patterns under my skin responded to everything. Danger made them pulse red. Clean water turned them blue. Sephis presence lit them white-hot.

I met creatures along the way. Things that might have been deer or wolves or birds before corruption claimed them. Most fled when they saw me. A few approached, drawn by something in my altered scent or appearance.

I healed what I could. Partial purifications that eased their pain without removing the corruption entirely. They watched me with grateful, confused eyes before disappearing back into the twisted landscape.

On the third day, I found ruins. Ancient stone covered in symbols that made my patterns resonate. Grace's song became complex, incorporating melodies I'd never heard. The symbols weren't decoration. They were maps, showing safe paths through the corruption.

I copied them into my journal, letting the crystalline formations guide my hand. Some knowledge could only be transmitted through resonance rather than sight.

On the fifth day, Sephis began following me. Not attacking, just... watching. Groups of them moved in coordination, building structures of crystal and bone for purposes I couldn't understand. When Grace sang, they paused in their work, looking around as if remembering something important.

They were parts of something larger. Cells in a vast organism. The corruption had purpose. It was building something.

By the seventh day, I stopped counting.

The crystalline patterns had spread up my arms, across my chest, along my throat. They no longer felt foreign. They felt like organs I'd always been missing, senses I'd never known I needed.

The wilderness blurred past. Corrupted forests gave way to crystal plains, which dissolved into fields of living bone, which transformed into landscapes that defied description. I walked through them all, following a pull I couldn't name toward something I couldn't see.

Grace's songs changed with the terrain. Warning melodies for dangerous areas. Peaceful harmonies near clean water. Complex symphonies when we passed places where reality grew thin.

Sephis attacked periodically. Shambling creatures of flesh and crystal that moved with pack intelligence. I burned them away with light, not bothering to stop walking. The purifying radiance flowed from my skin automatically now, as natural as breathing.

The attacks felt distant. Unimportant. Like gnats buzzing around something too large to notice them properly.

◇◇◇◇

Then I saw it.

The tower rose from the desert horizon like a needle punching through reality itself. Massive beyond comprehension, its surface shifting between materials that shouldn't exist. Stone that flowed like water. Metal that sang with crystalline voices. Flesh that pulsed with the rhythm of a cosmic heart.

It stretched up until perspective failed, disappearing into clouds that moved in patterns too regular to be natural. At its base, Sephis creatures swarmed like insects around a hive, building structures that fed into the tower's foundation.

Grace's song became urgent, warning. But I couldn't stop walking toward it.

The pull was too strong now. Whatever had been calling me through the wilderness, drawing me deeper into the corrupted lands, it came from that tower. The source of everything. The heart of the infection that was slowly consuming the world.

A pack of Sephis emerged from a crystal formation to my left. Wolves made of shadow and bone, their eyes burning with borrowed intelligence. They charged across the desert sand, moving faster than anything their size should be able to move.

I didn't slow down.

Light erupted from my skin, purifying radiance that turned the attacking creatures to ash before they could reach me. The effort required no conscious thought. It simply happened, automatic as breathing.

More Sephis appeared. A bear made of living stone. Birds with wings of crystalline razor. Things that had no names because they'd never existed in the natural world.

I walked through them all.

The purifying light flowed constantly now, a corona of radiance that dissolved corruption on contact. The desert around me became a trail of glass and ash, marked by the passage of something that belonged neither to the corrupted world nor the clean one.

The tower grew larger as I approached. Not just taller, but wider, deeper, extending into dimensions that hurt to perceive. Its surface crawled with activity. Sephis creatures climbing its walls like ants, adding their own crystalline contributions to its ever-growing mass.

And at its apex, barely visible through layers of corruption, something burned with cold fire. A light that had been perverted into darkness, a star that had been enslaved to power something that should never have existed.

A similar yet different thing from my vision with Elara was building a gateway. Using the Sephis to construct a bridge between its prison and the world it wanted to consume.

I walked toward the base of the tower, leaving destruction in my wake. The crystalline patterns under my skin blazed with recognition and purpose. 

Grace's song rose above the sound of disintegrating Sephis, pure notes of defiance cutting through the desert air. Together, we approached the heart of corruption, carrying light into a darkness that had been growing for possibly longer than human civilization had existed.

Behind us, a trail of purified sand stretched back toward the dome cities. Ahead, the tower waited, pulsing with malevolent anticipation.