The Styx was not just a river, it was a gorge of liquid memories. As my body transformed into this dark, mineral substance, I stopped fighting against the descent. I was no longer a swimmer, I was an obsidian projectile cutting through the darkness.
The current seized me with unprecedented violence. It was not a surge of water, but a gravitational force pulling me horizontally, away from the area where Charon reigned. I was swept away into the bowels of the underworld. Around me, the river roared. Silhouettes of half-dissolved souls passed by me like gray flashes, carried away by the relentless flow of centuries. Some tried to cling to me, their translucent fingers sliding over my now smooth and cold stone skin, but I passed them by, carried by an inertia that seemed to respond to the call of the red flower in my mind.
The pressure in my stone lungs stabilized into a dull, constant pain. I was no longer breathing, but I could feel. Every vibration of the river reached me like an electric shock. I could feel the currents of hatred, the eddies of sadness, and the abysses of despair that made up this mercury water.
After what seemed like an eternity of chaos, the current began to slow. The roar of the river subsided into a viscous murmur. The slope of my fall became less steep. I saw shapes emerging from the void: rocky peaks, limestone arches formed by the accumulation of calcified remains, and finally, a glow. It was not sunlight, but a sickly phosphorescence, a greenish-gray glow emanating from the bottom.
My heavy, massive feet finally struck something solid.
The shock sent a wave of vibration through my stone skeleton. I was finally walking on the riverbed. But I wasn't in the middle of the current; I had been deposited on an inner bank, a shore hidden beneath the surface, where the waters of the Styx came to die against cliffs of petrified memories.
I slowly extricated myself from the liquid embrace. Each movement was a colossal effort, as if I were moving tectonic plates. As I emerged from the black water, I saw my new form revealed in the pale light of the place. My arms were carved from black rock of absolute purity, veined with faint scarlet reflections. The water slid off me without wetting me, as if my new nature rejected the river that had tried to devour me.
I knelt on this unfamiliar bank. The ground beneath me was not mud, but fine, ivory-white sand, composed of billions of bone fragments crushed by time.
I raised my head. Before me lay neither paradise nor even the hell I had imagined. Before me stood a desert of silence, an endless expanse of bone dust dotted with cyclopean ruins whose origins predated even the birth of the gods.
It was the Belly of the Abyss. And I was the only living thing—or at least, the only thing that moved—in this realm of stasis.
Then a smell reached me, despite my lack of a human nose. A smell of dry earth and ancient metal. And above all, a sensation. A pulling in my chest. Far away, beyond the dunes of bone, something was calling me. The fragment.
The Anomaly had found its playground.