Chapter 21 — Northbound Ashes
The wind howled across the northern ridges, carrying with it the taste of ash and rust.
Ignis Prime's crimson sun hung low behind shifting clouds, bleeding light over the jagged landscape. Rivers of molten rock pulsed far below, threading through black valleys like veins through a dying heart. The ground cracked with every step the trio took — brittle, warm, and whispering.
Vaibhav walked in silence, his steps measured.
Every few breaths, the distortion around him shimmered faintly. His eyes scanned the horizon, sharp and unblinking, as if reading the language of the land itself.
Shin followed a few meters behind, his combat gear dusted with volcanic grit, his jacket slung over one shoulder. His voice broke the silence.
> "I swear, even the air tastes like someone cooked a planet."
Alicia— her silver hair catching a streak of sunlight through the dust. "That's not far from the truth. The Qi here's denser — volatile."
Vaibhav crouched suddenly, touching the ground with his fingertips.
The surface pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat beneath the crust.
He drew in a slow breath.
> "The ground's alive."
Shin frowned. "Alive as in metaphor, or alive as in 'we're walking on a giant worm' alive?"
Vaibhav didn't answer immediately. He watched as the faint veins of light under the stone shifted direction — moving, ever so slightly, northward. Like blood responding to something deeper underground.
He straightened. "Neither. The Qi's flowing against natural gradient. It's being drawn… somewhere."
Alicia's brow furrowed. "That shouldn't be possible without a gravity core or an active rift."
"Exactly," Vaibhav murmured.
They continued northward.
For hours, the path led them through scarred terrain — jagged basalt cliffs, rivers of half-cooled magma, skeletal remains of trees reduced to glass by heat. In the distance, faint pillars of smoke rose like dying candles, marking places where the land still breathed fire.
The silence between them wasn't heavy; it was listening.
Every sound carried too far — a pebble's fall echoing like a whisper through the bones of the earth.
The First Signs
It was Shin who noticed it first.
"Hold up," he muttered, crouching near a slope of black rock.
Something half-buried in ash caught his attention — the twisted carcass of a beast.
Its flesh had fused into the ground.
Not burned. Absorbed.
Crystalline veins of translucent red threaded through its body, pulsing faintly like liquid glass. The air around it shimmered with static, the Qi density rising in irregular bursts.
Alicia knelt beside it, her hand hovering above the creature's chest. "Its Qi core's ruptured. But look — the veins aren't natural formations. They're… parasitic."
Shin grimaced. "So something fed on it?"
"No," Vaibhav said softly. "Something rewrote it."
He closed his eyes for a moment, stretching his perception outward. The Qi field was chaotic — tangled currents colliding and reversing, as if time itself stuttered around them.
He opened his eyes.
> "There's a pattern. Everything that moves, every current — it's circling a center point."
Alicia looked up sharply. "Meaning something's calling them."
Shin glanced around uneasily. "Then whatever's doing the calling has a fan club the size of a mountain."
The Herds
By dusk, the landscape shifted again.
The trio reached an open plain — an ancient riverbed turned black from heat and time. Across the horizon, beasts moved in herds — hundreds of them, different species traveling together, their roars subdued to a low, rhythmic hum.
They weren't attacking each other.
They weren't hunting.
They were marching.
Alicia whispered, "This many creatures… and no territorial conflict?"
"Yeah," Shin said quietly, "that's not normal."
The herds flowed north like a tide of muscle and Qi, eyes glowing faintly with synchronized pulses. Their movements weren't random; there was rhythm, almost like a heartbeat. The air itself seemed to vibrate with it.
Vaibhav watched in silence, his hand subconsciously resting near his blade. "It's coordination on a level no beast should have."
"Unless something higher is pulling the strings," Alicia added.
Shin's expression darkened. "You think it's another rift entity?"
Vaibhav shook his head. "No… Rift Entities don't sync like this. They corrupt. This is… unity."
The words left a weight in the air that none of them liked.
They camped atop a ridge that night.
The air was still — unnaturally so. Even the wind avoided the northern sky, as if it too feared to disturb something vast.
Shin sat beside the fire, tossing a small crystal between his fingers — a shard from one of the dead beasts earlier. It glowed faintly whenever it touched his skin.
> "So… you think that black eyed monster knows about this?" he asked.
Alicia nodded slightly. "He warned us about distortions before. But not like this."
Vaibhav didn't answer. He sat at the edge of the ridge, staring into the copper sky where clouds moved backward — flowing against the wind.
Something was twisting reality here. He could feel it in his bones — the slow pulse of an unseen force.
Behind them, Shin muttered, "Feels like the world's breathing."
Alicia looked at him.
He met her gaze, serious for once. "No, really. Listen."
The ground beneath them vibrated faintly — not from movement, but from rhythm. A subtle rise and fall, like a sleeping giant exhaling through stone.
Vaibhav closed his eyes.
He could hear it too.
> Bum. Bum. Bum.
Not sound — resonance. Qi pulsations echoing through miles of crust.
It wasn't random.
It was a heartbeat.
By morning, the sun rose wrong.
It was larger — distorted, as though a layer of molten glass hung between them and the sky. The air shimmered, bending light into streaks of orange and red.
Shin squinted upward. "Okay, that's new."
Alicia frowned, adjusting her wrist scanner. "Temperature's risen by fifteen degrees in the last hour. Radiation spike, too."
"Radiation?" Vaibhav echoed. "No… that's Qi compression."
The horizon rippled — not heat haze, but distortion. The air ahead bent in waves, revealing and concealing silhouettes that shouldn't exist.
Something was drawing in energy — massive amounts, enough to twist atmosphere.
They moved cautiously.
The deeper they went, the stranger it became.
Their shadows lagged half a breath behind them. Their reflections in obsidian pools flickered with delay — a few seconds out of sync, like the world forgot how to mirror them properly.
Alicia's breath hitched. "We're inside a distortion field."
Vaibhav's jaw tightened. "It's not natural. It's—"
Then they heard it.
A sound too low to be thunder. Too heavy to be breath.
A grinding groan that came from beneath the world.
The Colossal Marks
The trio crested the final ridge, and the sight froze them all.
Before them stretched a canyon — kilometers wide, carved through the basalt cliffs.
Not by water. Not by magma.
By claws.
Each mark was hundreds of meters long, gouged deep enough to expose glowing veins of molten Qi beneath the surface. The rock around the edges had melted and re-solidified, forming glassy spires that reflected the copper light.
Shin's voice cracked slightly. "You're kidding me…"
Alicia's hands trembled faintly, eyes wide. "This… this isn't recent. These scars are weeks old."
Vaibhav stepped forward, his eyes tracking the pattern — five distinct trenches, parallel, clean, precise.
Each gouge carried remnants of energy — faint, but overwhelming. Ancient. His senses recoiled as he reached out.
> "This thing didn't just walk through," he murmured. "It reshaped the land."
Shin swallowed. "Please tell me this thing's dead."
Alicia's voice was barely above a whisper. "If it is, what killed that?"
The ground trembled again — faint, rhythmic, distant.
Not quakes.
Steps.
Vaibhav raised a hand instinctively, motioning for silence. The wind fell still. Even the magma rivers below seemed to pause, waiting.
The sound came again, rolling through the canyon's bones — slow, deliberate.
Each tremor matched the heartbeat they'd felt earlier.
Shin mouthed, "It's moving."
Alicia's scanner flickered violently — readings spiking beyond scale. "The Qi flux is reacting to something beneath us. It's… it's waking up."
Vaibhav's gaze remained fixed on the horizon.
There — for an instant — he saw movement.
A silhouette against the burning clouds, too large to comprehend. It didn't walk; it shifted, like a mountain deciding to breathe.
The air thinned.
For a single, heart-stopping moment, all three of them felt it — an oppressive pressure pushing against their lungs. Not malice, not hunger — awareness.
Something vast and ancient was watching.
The crimson light dimmed, replaced by a flickering aurora that spread across the sky — veins of gold and black twisting together like stormfire. The temperature dropped sharply.
Alicia whispered, "What in the world…"
Vaibhav responded.
> "We keep moving north," he said quietly. "Whatever's calling them… it's close."
Shin stared at him. "You serious? After seeing that?"
Vaibhav looked over his shoulder, his expression unreadable. "If we don't, it'll come to us anyway."
The wind carried ash past their faces, whispering like a language none of them could decipher.
And somewhere far beneath the earth —
a colossal eye opened.