They left Fallow's Reach a week later, their packs heavy with supplies and the wary blessings of people like Kael. Their route took them east, following the fading traceries of an ancient road now claimed by root and rift.
The Rotting World was not passive. It tested them. They encountered fauna: skittering, chitinous things the size of dogs that blended with the metallic debris, and silent, floating jellyfish-like entities made of condensed mist and static that discharged painful shocks if disturbed. Elara's gadgets and Lyra's growing control over localized decay—rusting a creature's carapace at a joint, dissolving the cohesive charge of a jellyfish—proved their worth.
But the land itself was the greater adversary. They navigated forests of crystalline trees that sang in the wind with razor-edged harmonics, requiring them to move in utter silence to avoid triggering shattering cascades. They crossed plains of unstable, glassy slag that crackled with residual heat.
Five days into the journey, they reached the feature Hob had warned of: the Glowing Chasm.
It was a wound in the world. A canyon miles wide, its depths lost in a swirling, actinic blue mist that pulsed with a slow, sickly light. Spanning it was not a bridge, but the colossal, twisted spine of some fallen behemoth—a pre-Ascent conduit or pipeline, now a corroded, semi-organic trestle of metal and petrified cable. It groaned in the wind rising from the chasm.
"The 'Sky-Snake's Back,'" Elara read from Hob's notes. "Says it's the only crossing for fifty miles. Also says the glow isn't radiation… exactly. It's 'congealed memory.' Residual psychic energy from the Cataclysm. Can cause… vivid hallucinations."
"Charming," Lyra said, her mouth dry. The pulse from the chasm made her teeth ache and the new, sensitive layers of her magic prickle with dissonance. The song here was a scream frozen in time.
They began the crossing. The "spine" was treacherous, its surface pitted and uneven, with gaps where cables had snapped. The blue mist coiled around their ankles, cold and tingling. At first, it was just a feeling of profound sadness, a weight on the soul.
Then, the echoes began.
For Lyra, it was the Sanctum. The clear, disappointed voice of Master Arcturus. "Your affinity… it is for the decay that interrupts it." The sound of the Stellar Shard breaking. The accusing whispers of Rust-touch. The memories were so vivid she stumbled, the phantom sounds drowning out the real groan of the metal.
"It's not real!" Elara called from ahead, her voice strained. "It's the chasm! Don't listen!"
But Elara was fighting her own ghosts. Lyra saw her flinch, heard her mutter a denial to some unseen voice—perhaps a mentor from the Artificers, or a regret from her past.
The phantoms grew stronger. Lyra saw shimmering images in the mist: the proud spires of Skyreach falling, crumbling to rust under her touch. Herself, alone in a world of grey ash. The guilt was a physical force, threatening to push her over the edge.
Her magic, agitated by the psychic torrent, reacted instinctively. It reached out, not to fight the echoes, but to touch them. To interact with this "congealed memory" as if it were a substance.
And she felt it. The memories had a texture, a brittle, crystalline structure of solidified emotion. Her affinity brushed against one—the moment of her Expungement. She didn't try to dispel it. Following Elara's earlier logic, she agreed with its nature. It was a moment of ending. Of rupture.
She focused her will, and whispered to the memory that its work was done. That it could… shatter.
The psychic crystal of that particular memory dissolved around her. The phantom voice of Arcturus cut off. The weight of that specific shame lifted, leaving only the dull ache of the original event, but not its amplified, haunting echo.
She gasped, the effort immense. It was like performing brain surgery on her own soul. But it had worked.
"Elara!" she shouted over the wind. "Don't fight them! Break them! They're like… like psychic limestone. You can weather them!"
Elara, her face pale, nodded in understanding. She lacked Lyra's affinity, but she had formidable will. Lyra saw her close her eyes, her jaw set. She was applying a Keeper's principle: find the fault line in the system and apply precise pressure. A moment later, a grim smile touched Elara's lips as one of her own ghosts seemed to fade.
Together, they moved forward, not as victims of the chasm, but as sculptors in its medium. Lyra dissolved the clinging memories of failure. Elara deconstructed the echoes of regret with logical precision. The crossing became a brutal, introspective battle, each step earned by breaking a piece of their own past.
When they finally stumbled onto solid ground on the far side, both were trembling with psychic exhaustion. The blue glow of the chasm faded behind them, but the silence that followed was profound.
Lyra looked back at the mist-choked abyss. She had not just crossed a physical gap. She had used her power of decay on memory itself. It was a violation of a sacred boundary, and a liberation she hadn't known she needed.
Elara clapped a hand on her shoulder. "Well," she said, her voice hoarse but bright with triumph. "Now we know you can rust a ghost. A 'field of anti-will' might just be another kind of phantom."
Lyra nodded, her breath steaming in the cooler air of the eastern reach. The Silent Foundry lay ahead, a place that hushed will. She was terrified. But for the first time, she also believed, deep in her corroded, resonant soul, that she might be the exact, wrong-shaped tool needed to crack it open. The song of the God-Engine's Core was out there, and she was learning to sing in the key that could find it