ERIS
He had gone into the Pit. The actual, swallowing dark where fallen things festered.
Not some poet's metaphor for hardship, but the true prison-realm, the bile at the bottom of creation where corrupted spirits gnawed on the memory of grace.
And Soren, whose soul was winter-forged, whose breath was the north wind given form, had descended into that consuming heat like some fabled knight from a cautionary tale... the kind who earns a song only because he does not live long enough to learn from his folly.
He would be unmade. Consumed. The Pit was not a place but a living hunger, a conscious maw that fed on alien magic as a lamprey feeds on lifeblood.
It would drink his ice, his frost, his very essence, slowly, thoroughly, with a relish that transcended mere annihilation.
The terror that rose within me had claws. It dug into the cage of my ribs, a visceral, squirming thing that stole my breath and made thought a distant, brittle thing.
