Chapter Six: The Clearing
The hum returned the next night. Stronger.
And the night after that. Stronger still.
By the fifth night, it had texture. It felt like Cold fingers plucking at the tendons in his wrists. A pressure against his sternum that pushed and pushed and did not relent. A pattern etched itself into his thoughts, geometric and precise, repeating with the patience of something that had been waiting longer than he'd been alive.he didn't like this feeling.
Alright. Fine. You win. I'll come see what you want. But if this turns out to be a weird mushroom or a singing rock, I'm going to be very disappointed.
He moved through the sleeping village past midnight. The moon hung thin, a bone chip in the black. Mira's breathing was steady in the loft behind him. His parents' door was closed. The hearth was cold.
He crossed the southern tree line, and the world changed.
The familiar sounds died first. No crickets. No rustle of night birds. The silence had weight to it, a physical density that pressed against his eardrums. Moonlight didn't reach the ground here. It broke apart on the twisted canopy and scattered into sharp fragments on the soil.
The air temperature dropped. His breath fogged. The scent of pine and loam soured into something metallic. Wet stone and rust. Old blood.
This forest smells like a wound. A very old wound that nobody bothered to clean.
The ground sloped downward. Roots grabbed at his boots. The pressure in his skull became a compass needle, steady and true, pulling him forward through the dark.
He found the clearing.
It formed a perfect circle of barren black earth. No moss at its edges. No weed breaking its surface. Not even fungus. The soil had a glazed quality, like black glass frozen in motion. At its center stood the altar.
It was not built. It was a single slab of stone that had erupted from the ground, massive and scarred. Its surface was covered in grooves and channels that formed no recognizable pattern. They looked less like carvings and more like wounds left by something clawing its way out from inside. A dark substance, thicker than shadow, seeped from these channels and pooled at the base.
The air above the altar pulsed. This was not Aether. Zack had spent his life watching Aether move in clean, luminous currents. This light was bruised. A sick violet shot through with threads of corroded gold. It moved in slow, agonized spirals, knotting and unknotting itself.
Well. This is the most inviting place I've ever been. Really sets a mood. The mood is "leave immediately," but still.
The whispers came.
They bypassed his ears entirely. They formed as pure understanding inside his skull, three distinct impressions that felt older than language itself.
GOLD. UNBREAKING.
A vision slammed into him. A towering citadel under a sun that gave no warmth. Walls so thick and perfect that nothing could pass. A will that could never bend. Order imposed with absolute force.
That's a prison. A pretty prison, but a prison.
CRIMSON. CONSUMING.
Heat. A mouth large enough to swallow stars. Hunger without floor or ceiling, appetite that fed and fed and never stopped feeding. Power through taking. Growth through devouring.
That's a stomach. A cosmic stomach. Hard pass.
BLACK. EMPTY.
No vision. No sensation. The absence of both. The silence after a universe stopped making noise.
Negation.
The void.
The Black saw him. He felt its attention settle onto the hollow space where his dantian should have been, onto the gap where the Aether refused to flow. It did not call to him with promises of strength or glory. It called with recognition. The way one empty room acknowledges another.
Oh. You know me.
From the seeping shadows at the altar's base, the bruised light gathered itself. It drew upward into the shape of a man in armor so old its design had no name. The spectral Warden stood with its featureless helmet turned toward Zack. Where its face should have been, two pools of deeper dark stared out. Holes in the fabric of everything.
"Heir."
The word formed inside Zack's skull. Dry. The sound of dead leaves stirred in a sealed room. It carried a weariness that spanned more time than Zack could calculate.
Heir. Of what? This rock? This creepy clearing? I didn't sign up for an inheritance.
"The vessel is prepared. The remnants remain. Choose."
"What are they?"
"Fragments. Of the First Path. The truth before the Shattering." The Warden's head tilted. The dark pools seemed to drink the light around them. "Broken. Corrupted. But power endures."
The First Path. The Forgotten one. The road that came before Body, Soul, and Hybrid. The one from the old stories that nobody believes.
Apparently the old stories forgot to mention the creepy altar and the ghost with no face.
"The Gold forges an unassailable self. The Crimson takes all for itself." The Warden paused. "The Black unmakes. It is the Empty Hand."
"Why does that one feel like it already knows me?"
"You are empty. The Empty Hand requires a hollow to hold it. This one seeks a vessel of absence." Another pause. Longer. "In all my time as Warden, only one man chose this path. He did not have a good ending. I recommend you choose one of the others."
The ancient cosmic guardian is giving me career advice. "Don't pick the scary one." Noted.
The Warden stared at him for a stretched, uncomfortable moment. Then its composure cracked.
"Now choose, or I fade. The chance passes for another age."
No pressure. Just a once-in-an-epoch decision in a haunted clearing at two in the morning. I'm sure I'll think clearly about this.
Zack stood still. The three concepts hung in the air, each pulling at a different part of him. The Gold tugged at his pride. To be unbreakable. To never bend again. To build walls so high that no Guildsman's verdict could reach him.
Walls are for hiding behind. I'm done hiding.
The Crimson tugged at his anger. To devour everything that had dismissed him. To consume their doubt and grow fat on their fear. To take and take until the world owed him nothing because he'd already claimed it all.
Hunger is its own cage. I've seen Joren eat his bitterness every day. It made him smaller, not bigger.
The Black tugged at nothing. It sat in the silence and waited.
That's the thing about emptiness. It doesn't promise. It doesn't threaten. It just is. And I've lived with "just is" for fourteen years. I know how to carry nothing. I've been practicing.
He thought of the grey crystal. The crowd pulling away. The long walk home through a village that couldn't look at him. He thought of Mira wrapping her strained wrists because she worked double to cover for his absence. His father's hand on his shoulder, heavy with things he couldn't say.
He thought of Burrel's wooden knife spinning through the air. The single word: "Good."
He didn't want to be a fortress. He didn't want to be a mouth.
He wanted the power to unmake the verdict. To erase the word written over his life. To reach into the silence and find that the silence had teeth.
His arm lifted. The movement felt inevitable. His index finger extended, pointing past the altar, past the three concepts, into the heart of the emptiness.
At the Black.
"That one."
Might as well. The other two sound like a lot of paperwork.
The spectral Warden went still. The corrupted light around its form rippled. Not approval. Regret. Deep and solemn. A mourner watching a coffin lowered into ground.
It had guarded these broken remnants for epochs, and now it had to give the worst one away.
"So be it."
The words stirred no air.
"May your heart remain your own, child of the Hollow. Those who seize the Forgotten Way walk alone."
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But I'll take what I can get.
The Warden's form began to dissolve, and the bruised light above the altar surged, spiraling inward toward the center of Zack's chest.
Then the world broke apart.