Chapter 22:
Hito-mane Extermination: Memento Mori V
Hollow Dawn
Pain, from Naruto
...
Ryuzuki ran.
He didn't know where he was going anymore. The concept of a destination had dissolved miles ago, chewed away by panic and the raw, rhythmic pounding of his pulse in his ears. He only knew, with a certainty that burned hotter than the physical exhaustion tearing through his limbs, that he couldn't stay there. He couldn't remain within the shadow of the capital’s high stone walls, where the air still tasted of smoke.
The image of his squad lying motionless on the dirt ground refused to leave his head. It was burned into the back of his eyelids, a horrific canvas. Every time he blinked, he saw them again, stark and unmoving under the harsh glare of the sky. These were the men and women he had worked beside for weeks, individuals whose habits, quirks, and convictions he knew as well as his own. They were people he had trusted with his life on a dozen different battlefields, individuals who had shared his bread, laughed at his terrible jokes. Now, they were reduced to a terrible, static tableau of stillness. He told himself they were alive.He repeated the words like a mantra, forcing them through his gritted teeth as he moved. They had to be. The alternative was a vast, yawning abyss of grief and horror, something he couldn't allow himself to think about, not now, not while the adrenaline was the only thing keeping his legs from buckling beneath him. If he accepted that they were gone, the sheer weight of it would crush him into the dirt before he could take another step.
His lungs burned with an agonizing, searing heat as he pushed deeper through the dense, tangled forest that bordered the outer rings of the capital. The manicured roads had long since given way to choked undergrowth and briars. Sharp branches whipped against his face and arms, leaving thin, stinging wounds across his skin and tearing at the fabric of his uniform. Roots, thick and gnarled like the fingers of buried men, threatened to catch his feet with every desperate step he took across the uneven forest floor. Still, despite the pain, despite the exhaustion, he kept moving.
Faster.Farther.
He needed to go anywhere else. Anything to put distance between himself and the utter humiliation he had suffered. The sting of defeat, the sickening realization of his own helplessness as everything crumbled around him, was a far worse torment than the physical strain tearing his muscles apart. He was fleeing like a coward, yet the instinct to survive and escape the suffocating weight of the Gate Guard drove him forward with a frantic, unyielding momentum.Hours passed.
At least, it felt like hours. In the chaotic blur of his flight, time had lost all objective meaning, stretching out into an endless cycle of gasping breaths, shattering twigs, and the relentless thud of his boots against the damp earth. The bright, unforgiving light of the afternoon sun slowly dipped beneath the jagged canopy of the treetops, painting the sprawling forest in fading shades of deep gold, bruised purple, and long shadowed orange.As the daylight began to fail, the shadows between the massive trunks stretched longer, reaching out across the forest floor like dark, seeking fingers. The air, which had been humid and thick, became noticeably cooler, carrying the damp, earthy scent of moss and decaying leaves. Yet, despite the dropping temperature and the heavy fatigue anchoring his bones, Ryuzuki never slowed down. He drove himself forward through the gathering dusk, propelled by pure desperation.
Not until his legs physically refused to carry him any farther.The sudden failure of his body was absolute. His muscles gave way, trembling violently under the strain of the endless sprint. He stumbled to a chaotic stop, his boots skidding through the loose dirt, and grabbed the rough, deeply ridged bark of a nearby tree before collapsing heavily to one knee.His chest rose and fell violently, expanding and contracting in ragged, agonizing gasps as he struggled to catch his breath. His throat felt dry and caked with dust, each inhalation tasting of copper and panic. He bowed his head, resting his forehead against the cool, damp wood of the tree, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. And that was when he heard her.
"Ryuzuki."
His entire body froze. Every muscle, still twitching from the exertion of his run, locked instantly into rigid paralysis. The sound seemed to slice directly through the ambient rustle of the woods, piercing straight into his core. The voice was soft. It was gentle, carrying an intrinsic warmth that belonged to a lifetime of quiet mornings and comforting embraces. It was intimately familiar, a sound he had not heard in what felt like an eternity, yet one he could never mistake. It was his mother's voice. He slowly lifted his head, his neck stiff and resistant, and looked around the darkening grove. His eyes scanned the dense thickets of brush, the spaces between the massive trunks, and the deep pools of shadow gathering in the hollows of the earth.Nobody.
The forest remained entirely empty. There were no footprints in the dirt other than his own, no rustling of fabric against the low hanging leaves, no shifting silhouettes. A cold, heavy feeling settled deep into his stomach, spreading outward until it chilled his very blood. It was a sensation born not of the cooling evening air, but of an instinctual, underlying dread.
"Come home."
Ryuzuki shut his eyes tightly, squeezing them shut until patterns of light danced across the darkness of his eyelids. He shook his head, a small, desperate gesture of denial against the empty air. "No," he whispered, the word scraping against his raw throat. The voice didn't disappear. If anything, it became clearer, vibrating with such a presence that made it feel as though the speaker were standing mere inches away from his ear."Come home, Ryuzuki."
Then another voice joined it. This one was a younger voice, lighter but laced with a sharp, demanding edge that cut through the soft cadence of the first. It was a voice from his past, one he knew almost as well as his own, tied to memories of shared youth and long forgotten promises. "Brother." His breathing hitched, catching sharply in his chest.Sato.
"What are you doing?" the voice asked, the tone carrying a heavy, disappointed weight that pressed down on Ryuzuki’s shoulders like a physical hand. Ryuzuki pressed both hands tightly against his ears, digging his palms into the sides of his head in a futile attempt to shut out the sound, to drown out the ghosts invading his mind. "Stop," he muttered, his voice cracking under the strain."Mom's worried."
"Why did you leave us?"
"You promised you'd come home but brother."
The questions came in rapid succession, overlapping, shifting in pitch and intensity. His fingers dug deeper into the sides of his head, his fingernails biting into his scalp as he curled inward, trying to make himself as small as possible beneath the trees. "Stop," he begged, louder this time, though the word felt hollow and powerless against the onslaught.The voices ignored him entirely. They continued speaking with an eerie, detached continuity, as though they were standing right beside him in the fading three moons light, leaning over his collapsed form. It was as though they had been following him through the woods all along, footsteps silent, waiting for him to finally break and slow down.
His mother. His brother. Their words overlapped and tangled together, the sentences bleeding into one another, multiplying in volume and frequency until they became a chaotic, rising tide of sound. He could barely understand any of them anymore; it was a cacophony of accusation, grief, and longing that threatened to tear his mind apart. Then a third voice appeared.And suddenly, everything else disappeared. The overlapping complaints of his brother and the gentle entreaties of his mother vanished into absolute nothingness, cut off mid-syllable.
"Ryuzuki."
His heart nearly stopped. The sudden halt of his pulse felt like a physical blow to his sternum. That voice.No.
No no no.
Not her. Anyone but her. His eyes slowly opened, staring blankly at the dark earth beneath him. The forest remained completely empty. There was no one there, no physical being to claim the sound, yet he still heard her with a terrifying, crystal-clear resonance."Ryuzuki."
It was Akari.
It was his wife. The woman whose horrific murder had shattered his life into a thousand jagged, uncollectible pieces. His throat tightened so severely he could format no air. The simple utterance of her name within his own mind was enough to evoke a visceral wave of nausea. He remembered all of the blood. Too much blood.He remembered the vivid, sickening crimson staining the pale tatami mats, pooling in the grooves of the floorboards. He remembered broken furniture, splintered wood scattered across the room like kindling, and the fragile porcelain she had cherished reduced to dust. He remembered a shattered room, a space that had once been a sanctuary transformed into a slaughterhouse. He remembered a lifeless body, cold and still, and the realization of a future that had been violently, permanently stolen from him in a single night of unchecked brutality.
"You weren't there."
The words felt like a physical knife sliding smoothly between his ribs, twisting deeply into the most vulnerable parts of his soul. The accusation was quiet, devoid of anger, which somehow made the delivery infinitely more devastating. Ryuzuki lowered his head until his forehead touched the damp earth, his fingers clutching at the dirt and dead leaves."Please."
His voice barely escaped his mouth, a pathetic, ragged whimper that was swallowed instantly by the surrounding trees."You weren't there."
"You promised."
His breathing became completely uneven, a chaotic series of short, shallow gasps. The voices were everywhere now, no longer confined to a single point in space. They seemed to emanate from the trees themselves, from the earth beneath him, from the very air he was breathing. His mother. His brother. His late wife. They were calling to him, accusing him of his failures, forgiving him with a sickening gentleness, and begging him to come home to a place that no longer existed. It made no sense. None of it made any sense. They were either dead, or far away, yet their ghost were crowding the twilight, suffocating him with their collective presence.Eventually, through sheer force of terror and desperation, he forced himself back onto his feet. His muscles screamed in protest, his knees trembling violently as he stood, because standing still felt infinitely worse than the agonizing strain of movement. Because if he stopped moving, if he remained huddled at the base of that tree listening to the choir of his ghosts, he felt like he might break apart completely, scattering into the wind like dry ash. So he walked.
One step.
Then another.Then another.
He forced his broken body into motion, dragging his boots through the undergrowth, using the sheer momentum of his fear to keep his balance. The forest around him remained thick and untouched, an ancient wilderness that seemed indifferent to his internal torment. Massive trees stretched high toward the darkening sky, their branches weaving together into a dense canopy that blocked out the emerging stars. Tangled roots twisted across the ground like sleeping serpents, half-hidden by layers of fallen leaves and decay. Birds chirped somewhere overhead, their sharp, clear notes signaling the transition from day to night, and the leaves rustled softly whenever a gentle wind passed through the upper boughs.Normal.
Everything was normal. The world was behaving exactly as a forest should at the arrival of dusk. Yet, despite the outward appearance of reality, something felt deeply, fundamentally wrong. The wrongness wasn't a sound or a sight; it was an intuitive pressure, a sudden shift in the weight of the woods.The feeling grew stronger with every step he took, intensifying until it manifested as a physical sensation on his skin. It felt like invisible eyes were watching him from somewhere beyond the immediate trees, tracking his slow, stumbling progress through the dark. Observing him. Ryuzuki tried to ignore it. He focused entirely on the placement of his feet, on the rhythmic crunch of dry leaves beneath his soles, forcing his mind away from the perimeter of his vision.Then the birds stopped.
Instantly.
There was no fading out of song, no gradual winding down of the evening chorus. The chirping vanished as if severed by a blade. The rustling leaves vanished. The gentle, ambient sigh of the wind through the high canopy disappeared entirely, leaving the branches frozen in mid-sway. Even the small, scuttling sounds of insects and nocturnal creatures in the underbrush were snuffed out in a fraction of a second. The forest fell silent. The distinction was profound and terrifying. Quiet implied the presence of life carrying out its existence softly; silence, this specific silence, felt like the total eradication of sound itself, a vacuum that rushed in to fill the void left by nature.The absolute difference terrified him. It was a sensory deprivation so sudden that it made his ears ring with a high, strained pitch. His footsteps stopped. He held his foot suspended in the air for a fraction of a second before lowering it soundlessly to the earth, terrified of the noise his own body might make in this fragile environment. A cold chill crawled slowly up his spine, each vertebra freezing in turn as the sensation moved upward to the base of his skull. Slowly, his movements deliberate and stiff, he looked around.
Nothing had changed visually. The trees remained exactly where they had always been, their massive trunks standing like dark sentinels. The roots remained buried beneath the earth, gnarled and motionless. The forest still looked entirely normal, a snapshot of an early year woodland frozen in time.
Yet the silence felt unnatural. It was heavy, oppressive, pressing against his eardrums with the weight of deep water. It felt like the world itself was holding its breath, waiting for a trigger, pausing before a catastrophic descent. Ryuzuki swallowed, the sound of his throat closing clicking loudly in the absolute stillness.Then he blinked. And the forest disappeared. For a terrifying, disorienting moment, his mind struggled to understand what his eyes were reporting to his brain. The cognitive friction was immense, a violent grinding of expectation against reality. The warmth was gone. The soft, humid air of the evening had vanished in the space of a single eyelid movement. The colors were gone. The rich golds, deep purples, and earthy browns of the woods were entirely erased. The life was gone.
They stood dead and skeletal against a pale, featureless sky that held no sun, no stars, and no clouds, just a vast, monolithic expanse of dull gray light. The bark of the trees hung in rotting, blackened strips, peeling away from wood that looked as though it had been scorched by frost or age. Massive roots protruded from the frozen, snow covered ground like sharpened stakes, jagged and pale, waiting for someone unfortunate enough to lose their footing and fall upon their points. The forest looked dead for a very long time.
Ryuzuki slowly turned around, his boots sinking deep into the powdery white snow with a soft, muffled compaction.
The same view greeted him as before. He turned again, completing the circle, his eyes desperately searching for a single landmark, a familiar curve of a branch, or a glimpse of the forest he had just been standing within. Nothing changed.No matter where he directed his gaze, the landscape remained utterly identical, a repeating pattern of desolation. It was an endless graveyard buried beneath a heavy shroud of white, stretching out toward a horizon that didn't seem to end so much as fade into the pale gray of the sky.His pulse quickened, its rapid thudding a solitary, internal rhythm in a world that had ceased to beat. Has it always been snowing? The thought appeared suddenly in his mind, unbidden and intrusive. It was a quiet, insidious question that wormed its way through his panic, and what frightened him most was that he wasn't immediately sure of the answer. He knew it hadn't been. He remembered the heat of his run, the sweat stinging his eyes, the mud beneath his boots, and the fading light of the afternoon sun. He remembered the crispy air.
Didn't he?
The simple uncertainty alone was enough to make his stomach turn with a sickening, disorienting vertigo. If his memory could be questioned, if the transition could be so absolute as to retroactively alter his perception of time, then nothing was real. The ground beneath his feet felt unstable, despite being frozen solid. Slowly, with an agonizing caution, he began walking. Fear told him to run, to sprint blindly through the snow until his heart failed or he found an exit from this white nightmare. Curiosity, or perhaps a grim, fatalistic compulsion, told him to stay, to observe the mechanics of this impossible place. His legs, numb and stiffening rapidly from the biting cold, chose somewhere in between. He moved at a measured, deliberate pace, his body hunched against the wind that didn't stir the air but seemed to exist within the cold itself.The snow crunched loudly beneath his heavy boots. The sound broke the unnatural stillness, echoing strangely through the dead forest, refracting off the shriveled trunks in a way that made it sound distant and disconnected from his own movements.
As he moved deeper into the frozen expanse, the landscape began changing, evolving with a slow, deliberate malice. At first, there were only the dead, black trees, their bare branches clawing at the gray sky like the fingers of drowning men. Then flowers appeared. White flowers. At least thousands of them. They were pale roses. The symbol of the Kuroainaru clan.
They didn't sprout from buds; they simply manifest, clinging to branches that should have been dead, rotting, and brittle. They grew one by one, then tree by tree, a silent, rapid blossoming of colorless foliage that transformed the forest around him.
The flowers and the surrounding nature were a pale, translucent white, looking more like shards of thin ice or carved bone than organic matter. They did not rustle. Even as they multiplied, covering the skeletal branches in a dense, pale canopy, they remained perfectly, terrifyingly still. The forest transformed around him like a blank canvas slowly being painted by unseen, patient hands. The deeper he walked, the denser the woodland became. The trees pressed closer together, their trunks thickening and narrowing the pathways between them until he had to actively weave through the maze of black wood and white leaves.The roots tangled beneath the snow, rising up in high, frozen ridges that forced him to climb and scramble, his hands growing numb as they scraped against the icy crust. The pale canopy overhead thickened with every yards traveled, weaving together so tightly that it eventually swallowed the sky entirely, plunging the forest into a dim, monochromatic evening.
The deeper he went, the more he felt it.
The sensation of being watched had returned, but it was no longer the vague, distant observation he had felt in the woods. It was intimate. It was heavy. It was the distinct sensation of being watched not by one thing, but by many. The white flower seemed like a thousand open eyes, fixed upon his solitary, dark figure as it moved through their frozen world. Every space between the trunks felt occupied, as if the air itself were crowded with spectators holding their breath, tracking the heat of his body.
Then he saw movement. Far ahead, down a narrow corridor formed by the compression of the dead trees, a silhouette stood among the pale drifts. Ryuzuki immediately stopped, his breath freezing in his throat, a cloud of vapor suspended before his face. The figure was too distant to identify clearly through the dim, filtered light of the canopy. It was a dark shape against the endless white, its outlines blurred by the distance and the strange, refracting properties of the frozen air.
He couldn't tell what the hell it was, or what it was trying to be. It possessed a vertical, bipedal stance that suggested a human form, yet there was a stillness to it that felt entirely unnatural, a complete lack of the minute shifts and micro movements that characterize living things. He couldn't tell what it was, yet every instinct in his body, every evolutionary warning system honed by generations of survival, screamed at him to leave. The air around him felt charged, thick with an imminent danger that made the hairs on his arms stand on end despite the freezing cold. The silhouette didn't move. It simply stood there in the distance, an unblinking, dark vertical line against the stark white canvas.
Watching.
Ryuzuki glanced behind him, desperate to find the path he had just carved through the drifts, intending to retrace his steps and escape the proximity of the figure. And immediately felt his blood run cold. The forest he had traveled through was gone. Not hidden by the density of the trees. Not obscured by a sudden fall of snow or a shift in the light.
Gone.
The distant tree line he had spent the last hour navigating had vanished completely. In its place stood a solid, impenetrable wall of massive, blackened trunks, fused together by ice and tangled roots into a seamless barrier that allowed no passage. There were no spaces between them, no paths, no signs that any human being had ever passed through that way.
Somehow, without his noticing, without his realizing, the landscape had rewritten itself behind his back. The forest had closed in like a trap, sealing the door the moment he stepped through.
He was already deep within the forest. Far deeper than he should have been. His breathing quickened, the gasps coming fast and shallow, the clouds of vapor puffing out in rapid succession as his panic reached a crescendo. Slowly, his heart hammering against his ribs like a frantic drum, he turned back toward the figure.
And realized it was closer.
Much closer.
That was when he saw it. Two large horns with dried blood on each one rose above the pristine, powdery drifts. Beady red eyes burned with an internal luminescence, their pupils shaped like something that was both still and never changing, a paradox that arrested the mind. Its brown fur was dreaded with something viscous that coated it like a layer of oil, catching the dim gray light with an unnatural, wet sheen. When the creature parted its heavy jaws, it revealed so many jagged rows of teeth that it didn't make sense. They crowded the black gums, arranged in chaotic, concentric rings.
It was about 14 meters away, but even so, Ryuzuki felt it could catch up in less than a second. The sheer explosive power latent in its coiled, oil slicked frame was undeniable. But the mysterious beast didn't run after him. It didn't growl, it didn't even move an inch against the stark white backdrop, instead it did something far scarier. It spoke.
In a deep and unruly voice, it told him that he had to return home and that all would be forgiven by his family. The voice was a low, guttural vibration that rumbled through the frozen earth and resonated within the marrow of Ryuzuki’s bones. Before Ryuzuki could form a response, the beast threw him a book whose cover had looked like it had survived a massive fire. The leather was warped, cracked, and blackened by ancient soot, the edges curled and fragile.
All he could make out on the charred cover of the book was the author of the book, “E.K.”. He didn't know what this meant, as no historical figure in the capital's archives bore those initials that he knew of. The first page was also intact somehow, completely unblemished by the flames, and held the quote: “I pray my children will save the world from its death by the weight of itself.”
The mysterious creature, now slowly backing into the darkness gathering between the fused tree trunks, revealed that even he doesn't know what it's supposed to mean. Ryuzuki looked back up at him as his eyes adjusted to the dark, and he could see that he was surrounded by skulls of humans and animals alike. Thousands of bleached, frost cracked bones formed a horrific pavement extending into the gloom. Just as he started to stutter back, his boots slipping against the snow as he tried to distance himself from the graveyard, he blinked, and the forest was back as it was.
The biting cold vanished in an instant, replaced by the damp, cool air of the evening. Ryuzuki looked down at his hands and he still held the mysterious book, the soot from the burned cover staining his skin. The creature told him to go home and he knew that he wanted to as well. He needed the safety of his village to anchor his fracturing mind. He started running until he left the forest, until the sight of the Capitol was no longer in view over the horizon. He kept running for at least a few hours before eventually giving out in a small, sheltered clearing. He camped out, huddling in the brush without a fire, and then when the morning came he made his way towards Harpyra.
It took about 3 weeks to get from his village to the nation's capital and it took the same amount of time to get from the capital back to his home. He walked through sun and rain, his mind entirely focused on the horizon. When he finally saw his village in the distance, he couldn't believe it. Everything was as he left it. The small houses stood in neat rows, and smoke curled lazily from the chimneys. Nothing visibly had changed, and that was good. A profound sense of relief washed over him. He couldn't wait to apologize to his mother and little brother, he couldn't wait to see his friend, he couldn't wait to finally mourn his late wife.
But as he entered the village, and ran towards his childhood home, he noticed something was a bit off. As Ryuzuki got older, he spent almost all of his spare money on rebuilding the town. This made it go from some run down town in the middle of nowhere to a town where people could live without fear of when their next meal would come. He had always been a popular guy, especially after the renovations, but nobody seemed to recognize them. He moved through the village and not one person stopped him to say hello or raised a hand in greeting. After what happened a few weeks ago when he ran away and everybody tried to stop him, he expected to be walked back with open arms, or at least questions.
But he didn't care. When he finally made it back to his mother's house he opened up the door and his mom was standing there and she looked frightened. She didn't say anything, her hands gripping her apron as if he were an intruder. Ryuzuki told her how sorry he was for leaving in the way he did but it's just that he was dealing with a lot of stuff. He revealed to her that somebody had murdered Akari and that he needed to find out who and why did it.
His mom didn't say anything, she looked confused. She glanced over at a family photo before finally looking like a spark shined in her eye. She looked back up at Ryuzuki as she confusingly said his name. She asked him what he was talking about and when did he leave. Ryuzuki took this as a sign that she didn't want to talk about it since it was all in the past, assuming she was trying to brush away the pain of his desertion. But he still needed to speak about the murder of his wife.
That's when he knew something was off. His mother asked him when he got married and who his wife was and that she was happy for him. Ryuzuki was confused as he knew that his mother and little brother were both at his wedding last year. He remembered his mother crying tears of joy, and he didn't understand why she acted like she knew nothing about her own son.
That's when he saw his little brother, Sato, walk out of his room. He asked their mom who this man was and Ryuzuki's Mom told him that it was his brother. Sato looked at Ryuzuki with cold suspicion, and Ryuzuki looked even more confused.
He walked outside of the house before making a full sprint down the road to his house where his late wife was murdered. When he got there, nothing had changed. The furniture was still splintered, the body was still there, and the blood was still soaking into the tatami mats, turned a horrific shade of blackish brown. Why hasn't anybody found the body? Why was she still sitting here instead of buried somewhere in a graveyard? Why did he feel like the same little boy 15 years ago who held no power? Nothing made sense. Everybody in the town acted like they didn't know him. Nobody bothered to even look into his house or find the body of Akari. Nothing was making sense to him anymore. Was this an illusion? Was he dealing with mass hysteria? What the hell was going on?
Something told him to read the book. He reached into his bag and fumbled the book in his hands repeatedly, his palms sweating against the soot. Most of the pages were ripped out or burned away, leaving only fragments floating in a sea of ash. But the first page he did see said this: “His home was gone, and in its place are monsters we knew as allies. They will feast upon the flesh of the people and continue to be a tumor until the monster the Sun God released takes them away. He will amass great fear in anyone who looks into his blank eyes. For he is th M-”.
The writing ended there. What did the book mean by monsters? He remembered something he heard from a colleague a few years ago about ancient beasts that could mimic a human in flesh and bone, stealing the forms of loved ones to slip into communities undetected. One page in the book said something about a cave mounted with something, though the rest of the sentence was obscured by a dark scorch mark. There was only one cave in the desert near him outside of town, a massive system located at the northern perimeter.
After about an hour of walking through the arid, rocky terrain, he made it to Prometheus, a tunnel of caves where it was said to house large armies in its seemingly never ending tunnels before an ambush. The landscape around the entrance was bleak, dominated by jagged pillars of black stone that rose from the cracked earth like broken peaks. The air grew progressively thinner and colder the closer he drew to the threshold, carrying a heavy scent of damp earth and stagnant mineral deposits. The entrance itself was a cold, dark maw that swallowed the desert light, creating a stark, unforgiving line where the bright heat of the wasteland died and an absolute, breathing darkness began.
He stood at the precipice, his body trembling from the physical toll of his march and the suffocating weight of the revelations destroying his reality. The silence inside the cavern was total, a vacuum that seemed to actively pull at his senses. He took a single, hesitant step past the threshold, his boots crunching against the loose gravel of the cave floor. The sound echoed unnaturally, bouncing off the high, invisible ceilings and traveling deep into the unseen subterranean pathways that stretched out for miles beneath the earth.
He forced himself deeper into the shadows, his eyes straining against the heavy gloom as the cave floor began to slope downward. The air became thick, carrying a suffocating pressure that made his lungs ache. Then, as he rounded a massive stone bend, he saw it.
His brain completely stalled, refusing to process the sheer, mind breaking horror laid out in the depths of the cavern. A profound, paralyzing terror seized his entire body, turning his limbs to lead. In an instant of absolute panic, his grip failed entirely.
The book dropped from his arms as a sudden draft whistled through the stone corridors, and it flipped to another page near the end of it that had been sealed shut by dried resin until this very moment. As the book struck the cold stone floor, the stubborn adhesive snapped under the force of the fall, exposing the hidden words to the dim light. It read: “And what he saw inside the cave, he will never be able to describe. He would never even if the 10 Fates showed him his story. Even when he brings a dragon to bear witness. But the Gods know, he will never forget.”
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