The ground moved beneath Cipher's boots.
Not shifted. Moved.Every step sank into a surface that flexed and breathed, as though the very soil were alive. What looked like dirt was in truth a writhing blend of bones, roots, and tattered parchment that pulsed faintly with residual light. Pages whispered beneath his feet, words half-burned and meaningless.
The air was heavy with dust, thick as fog, and stank of copper and decay. The scythe's silver glow struggled to pierce it, diffusing in halos that made shadows dance in deceptive patterns.
Auto hovered at his shoulder, the faint hum of its stabilizers distorted by static. "Cipher… this terrain is not consistent with recorded story residues. It is rewriting itself."
Cipher's jaw tightened. "I noticed."
He pressed onward, careful not to lean too hard on any surface for too long. The landscape constantly rearranged—stone arches melted into ribcages, trees dissolved into pillars of glass. Every horizon folded inward, as though the world were curling in pain.
Somewhere in the distance, a slow grinding echoed, like titanic gears turning beneath the ground.
Auto's lens flickered, trying to focus. "The sound persists at every angle. Source undetectable. It may be… everywhere."
Cipher didn't answer. He had long stopped trusting the geometry of this place. The Graveyard wanted to confuse him—to wear him down through disorientation, then strike when he faltered.
They reached a slope where the land seemed to convulse. The path ahead cracked open, revealing a chasm filled with viscous black liquid that writhed and gurgled. The stench was overwhelming, like rot distilled into steam.
Cipher crouched near the edge, studying it. The liquid shimmered with reflected light, but the reflections were wrong. Each showed a different scene—one a child's bedroom, another a throne room, another an empty classroom littered with dust. None were real.
Auto hovered closer. "It's memory runoff. Fragments discarded from stories that no longer hold shape."
Cipher rose, gripping his scythe. "Then let's not join them."
He conjured a narrow bridge of starlight, the blade's runes etching a silver line across the chasm. It held, though the air around it hissed as though resenting the intrusion. He crossed carefully, his eyes scanning the fog.
Halfway across, the surface rippled beneath him.
A hand burst from the chasm—a corpse-pale arm fused with torn parchment, fingers tipped in bone shards. Then another. Then a dozen.Bodies began clawing upward, crawling from the muck, each one stitched from remnants of stories that had died screaming. Some wore fragments of armor; others bore crowns of ink and vine. All were eyeless.
Auto's tone sharpened. "Contact. Multiple entities. Designation—unknown."
Cipher didn't hesitate. "Graveborn."
He swung.
The scythe's arc cleaved through the first wave, silver light cutting limbs and torsos in a shower of ash and liquid ink. But for each one that fell, another rose, dragging itself from the pit. Their mouths opened, not in screams, but in dry gasps like paper tearing.
Cipher reversed his grip, spinning the scythe low. The next cut severed three at once. He stepped back, balancing on the fragile bridge of light as it cracked under the shifting weight.
Auto projected a pulse of light downward. "Cipher, they're not attacking as individuals—they're a hive cluster. Destroying one reactivates the nearest ten!"
"Then I'll stop cutting and start burning."
He slammed the scythe into the bridge, channeling his energy through the blade. Silver runes blazed, and the entire structure erupted in light. The shockwave tore through the chasm, vaporizing the liquid into mist. The Graveborn disintegrated, their forms unraveling into drifting scraps that burned away midair.
The bridge shattered under the force.
Cipher leapt, landing hard on the far side. His boots skidded on loose shards of bone. He exhaled through his teeth, a low growl of pain escaping as the impact jarred his arm.
Auto stabilized beside him. "Your pulse is spiking. You sustained damage."
"Just my shoulder. I've had worse."
He rolled it once, testing the strain. It throbbed but held. He pressed onward.
The Crawling Lands only grew more grotesque.
They entered a region where the ground was a lattice of broken architecture—staircases leading nowhere, walls built from overlapping pages, skeletal remains embedded in the mortar. Faces whispered faintly from the stone, their words fragments of forgotten tales:"Once upon—""—no ending—""—please, rewrite me—"
Cipher ignored them. He had learned long ago that listening to the walls here led only to madness.
The path narrowed into a canyon, the walls glistening with slime and ink. Overhead, something vast shifted—an entire tower moving like an animal, dragging its foundation through the dirt with a sound like grinding teeth.
Auto's voice came faint. "Cipher, readings—anomalous gravitational fields ahead."
"Translation?"
"The landscape is alive."
He sighed. "Of course it is."
A sudden tremor shook the ground. The canyon walls flexed inward like lungs drawing breath. Dust and bone fragments cascaded around them.
Cipher braced himself, driving the scythe into the earth for stability. "Move!"
The canyon exhaled. A gust of wind roared through, thick with debris. The pressure threw Cipher to one knee. Auto spun out of control for a moment before realigning.
When the gale passed, Cipher found himself surrounded.
Graveborn—scores of them—emerging from the canyon walls, peeling themselves out of the stone like shedding skin. Their bodies shimmered with tar and script. Some carried weapons fused into their arms; others were nothing but crawling torsos, jaws gnashing.
Cipher set his stance. "Fine. Round two."
He charged.
The scythe blurred in his hands, each strike a flash of silver through black mist. He fought low, tight, efficient—his form honed by years of survival. Every swing cut down one or two, but there were too many. For every Graveborn he felled, three more clawed over the corpses.
One lunged from behind, catching him off-guard. Its claw raked across his back, tearing through the outer layer of his coat and drawing a line of fire down his shoulder. He spun, slamming the scythe's butt into its skull. The creature's head imploded, splattering ink.
Blood trickled down his arm. He hissed, gritting his teeth.
Auto fired a pulse of energy, disintegrating a cluster of approaching foes. "You are losing blood. Cipher—"
"I know."
He reached deep into the scythe, drawing on its core light. The blade screamed with power as he unleashed a wave of starlight that seared the canyon clean. The Graveborn evaporated, their death-cries fading into silence.
Cipher collapsed to one knee, breathing hard.
The wound throbbed, the blood bright against the pallid dust.
Auto drifted close. "That strike depleted over half your remaining resonance. You need rest."
Cipher shook his head. "No time. If I stop, this place swallows me."
He rose slowly, ignoring the ache that pulsed down his side. They pressed on.
Hours—or minutes, or days; time had lost meaning—later, they reached open ground again. The terrain sloped upward into a field of shattered monuments. The statues here were humanoid but incomplete—torsos without heads, faces half-erased, hands reaching skyward as if in pleading.
The ground trembled beneath them, rhythmic and distant. A heartbeat, felt more than heard.
Auto's lens rotated, trying to triangulate it. "The pulse is directional—origin approximately northeast. That aligns with the tower."
Cipher shaded his eyes, though there was no sun—only a dull gray luminescence filtering through fog. The skeletal tower stood far away, its outline distorted by shifting haze. Each flash of lightning within its ribs looked slower than the last, as if the tower itself were breathing.
He took a step toward it.
The landscape moved.
Not subtly. The world dragged sideways, the tower sliding farther away with each step he took forward. The statues seemed to twist in their poses, their hands turning from pleading to pointing.
"Auto…" Cipher murmured, his voice low. "Tell me what I'm seeing."
Auto's voice buzzed with static. "I—calculations are inconsistent. The displacement is not spatial. It's conceptual. You're not moving farther from the tower. The tower is removing itself from you."
Cipher felt the air chill. "Why?"
Auto's hum grew faint. "Because it knows what you are. And it does not want to be reached."
Cipher stared into the mist, watching the skeletal shape pulse once, twice, before fading behind the haze. His grip tightened on the scythe until his knuckles went white.
"So it denies me," he whispered.
The Automaton's reply came soft, almost reverent. "It's not distance… it's denial. This world doesn't want you to reach it."
Cipher exhaled, slow and steady. "Then we make it want to."
The fog thickened around him, and the heartbeat in the distance began to quicken.