The blue light of the Gate wasn't just a sight; it was a physical force. It pulled at the Dantian in his gut, a deep, resonant hum that vibrated through his bones and drowned out the panicked shouts of the villagers. Pain was a distant echo. His torn leg, his burned hands—they were just noise. The only thing that mattered was the shimmering blue rift.
The need to move was no longer a choice. It was like breathing, like the gnawing hunger that had been his companion for sixteen years. His body, broken and bleeding, obeyed the pull with a certainty his mind couldn't muster. Each limping step felt correct, inevitable. The burns on his hands flared with a brief, sharp agony before the sensation dulled again, lost in the overwhelming hum.
A hand clamped down on his shoulder, hard. The grip was like iron, practiced and inescapable.
"Leo, stop!"
It was Vex. The hunter's voice was a low growl, tight with an urgency that felt miles away. Leo tried to turn, but the grip held him fast.
"You walk through that, you don't come back," Vex said, his voice a flat, hard thing in the chaotic air. "This isn't a game."
Leo tried to pull away, to shrug off the grip, but Vex's strength was absolute. For a moment, the hunter was an anchor holding him to the real world.
Then the Dantian inside him pulsed.
It wasn't a technique. It wasn't controlled. A wave of raw, unfamiliar energy surged from his core, a primal, desperate reaction like a drowning man fighting for air. He shoved, a burst of strength he shouldn't possess.
Vex stumbled back, his hand falling away. The hunter's eyes were wide with shock, not at the push, but at the feeling behind it.
In that instant, Leo's gratitude for Vex, his respect for the man who'd saved him, vanished. It was replaced by a cold, simple thought that felt like it was spoken in a voice that wasn't his.
He's in the way. He doesn't understand. Move him.
The thought was terrifying in its alien simplicity, but it didn't slow him. He broke free and stumbled the final few meters toward the Gate. He didn't hesitate. He didn't slow. He walked directly into the shimmering blue curtain of light.
The sensation was immediate and wrong. It wasn't like passing through a doorway. It was like plunging into ice-cold static, a thousand tiny needles prickling every inch of his skin as reality itself seemed to unmake and remake him. The sounds of Millhaven—the clanging bell, Vex's distant shout—were severed instantly, as if a blade had cut the world in two.
He stumbled forward, out of the tearing cold, and his boots hit a solid surface.
He was in a void.
An endless, starless black stretched in every direction. There was no horizon, no walls, no ceiling. The floor was a smooth, obsidian-like surface that reflected no light, swallowing the very idea of it. He couldn't feel himself breathe, but his lungs weren't burning. He wasn't suffocating.
He was utterly, completely alone.
He turned. There was no Gate behind him. No shimmering blue rift. Just more of the same silent, empty blackness.
The pressure in his gut vanished without warning, like a hand simply letting go. The hum that had driven him forward cut out mid-beat, leaving only a sudden, hollow absence behind it.
And then the pain hit.
Not creeping back. Not easing in. It crashed down all at once, like the ground dropping out from under him. His burned hands screamed. His torn leg, which had carried him here on borrowed momentum, finally failed him.
His knees buckled.
He hit the cold, lightless floor, the impact echoing through his bones. The obsidian surface leached what little warmth he had left as the silence pressed in, absolute and uncaring.
Sera watched from the edge of the commons, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. She had followed him from the clinic, a sick feeling in her gut. She saw Vex grab him. She saw Leo, somehow, push the hunter away. And then she saw him walk into the light.
He just… vanished.
The blue surface of the Gate rippled once, like a stone dropped in a still pond, then settled. For a moment, nothing happened. A heavy silence fell over the commons, broken only by the distant, panicked shouts of villagers who were still fleeing. Vex stood a few meters from the Gate, his hand still outstretched, his face a mask of stunned horror. He looked like a man who had just watched someone step off a cliff.
Then came the sound.
It wasn't loud. It was a low crack, like ice breaking under immense pressure. A single, hairline fracture of deep, arterial red appeared on the Gate's blue surface. Then another, and another, spreading out in a spiderweb of crimson light. It wasn't like lightning; it was like watching an infection spread beneath skin, a bruise blooming in the fabric of the world.
The air, which had felt thin and cold, now became thick. Oppressive. Breathing felt harder, each inhale a conscious effort. Sera's skin prickled, and a knot of dread tightened in her stomach. The low, ethereal hum of the Blue Gate deepened, twisting into a hungry, guttural thrum that vibrated in her bones.
The blue light fought for a moment, then was consumed. The entire shimmering oval became a solid, unwavering wall of blood-red energy. It no longer felt like a doorway. It felt like an eye had opened, and it was watching them.
Vex took a stumbling step back, his face ashen. The hunter, the man who faced down Ember Wolves and tracked monsters through the Ironwood, looked terrified.
He whispered a single word, laced with a horror Sera had never heard in his voice before. "No..."
Then louder, his voice cracking as he roared at the remaining militia, "Gods below… a Red Gate. It's a Red Gate! Sound the retreat! Full quarantine!"
The militia, who had been frozen in a mixture of fear and awe, snapped into action. Their training overrode their terror. They started shouting, pulling the few remaining onlookers back, their movements frantic but disciplined. Vex's fear was their law.
A cold, selfish thought screamed through Sera's mind.
Run. He's dead. He was dead the moment he stepped inside. Save yourself.
The thought was so powerful it made her flinch as if struck. Her nails dug into her palms, the sharp pain a welcome distraction from the shame that washed over her.
A young militia member, a boy no older than Thomas, was backing away, his eyes wide with terror. "What's a Red Gate?" he asked, his voice trembling.
Vex didn't even look at him. His eyes were locked on the crimson wall. "It's a trial. A tomb," he said, his voice flat and dead. "It's Crown property, and anyone who goes in without their seal is a dead man. No one comes out."
The word "Crown" hit Sera like a physical blow. It was a final, absolute authority. It meant this was no longer a village problem. It was something far bigger, and far worse.
As Vex spoke, the crimson surface of the Gate began to shrink. The edges pulled inward, the oval of light closing like a wound. Someone screamed. "It's closing!"
It wasn't a portal anymore. It was a prison, and it was locking its only door.
The entrance was now half its original size and shrinking fast. Vex was shouting orders, establishing a perimeter, his voice a desperate anchor in the rising chaos. People were being dragged back from the edge of the commons, their faces masks of terror.
Sera's world narrowed to that shrinking crimson rift.
Leo was in there.
Alone.
And he was going to die.
The world narrowed to the shrinking crimson rift. Ten seconds. Maybe less. Vex was shouting orders, pulling people back, establishing a perimeter. He was doing his job. He was being smart. He was leaving Leo to die.
Panic clawed at Sera's throat, cold and sharp. He's dead. The thought was a certainty, a final, brutal fact. He's alone in there. They'll call him a criminal for this. They'll say he caused it. He'll just be… gone.
Her survival instinct, a primal thing forged in the harsh realities of Millhaven, screamed at her. Run. Hide. Forget you ever saw this. He made his choice.
But as the instinct to flee threatened to lock her legs, a memory cut through the noise. It was from a year ago, by the orphanage well. Marcus Renfell, his face a mask of casual cruelty, had been tormenting one of the younger orphans, a small girl who had spilled water on his boots. Leo, all of fifteen and already bearing the weight of the world's scorn, had stepped between them. He hadn't fought. He hadn't argued. He had just stood there, absorbing the verbal abuse, the shoves, the humiliation, until Marcus grew bored and left.
He hadn't left the girl alone.
The thought solidified, not as a choice, but as an absolute, non-negotiable truth. I'm not leaving him.
Before she could second-guess it, before the screaming terror could regain its hold, she ran.
Her feet pounded against the hard-packed earth. She shoved past a stunned militia member who stumbled back, his mouth open to shout a warning he never got to voice.
"Sera, no!" Vex's roar was a distant, unimportant sound, swallowed by the rush of wind in her ears. The world was just the closing eye of red light and the boy on the other side.
A single, ugly thought fueled her final steps, a selfish comfort in the face of certain death: If I die, at least I won't have to watch him die alone.
She didn't hesitate. She dove headfirst through the last sliver of the closing rift.
The sensation was not the cold static Leo had felt. It was violent, tearing heat, like plunging her hand into a forge. It felt like reality itself was actively rejecting her, trying to unmake her atoms, to burn her out of existence for the crime of trespassing.
The moment she was through, the world behind her vanished. There was no sound, no explosion, just a final, absolute severing. From the outside, the villagers would see the shimmering, fluid surface of the Gate harden into something solid and impassive, like a pane of blood-red glass hanging in the air—a wound in the sky that had scabbed over in crimson crystal. It was no longer a portal. It was a tombstone.
Sera landed hard on a cold, black floor, the impact jarring her bones. For a second, there was only the void, the same starless nothingness Leo had seen. Then she saw him, a crumpled heap a few meters away, unconscious.
The void lasted only a moment more.
The floor beneath them cracked, not like stone, but like reality itself was breaking. Spires of dark, unfamiliar rock erupted from the ground, twisting and growing, forming the walls of a massive, circular chamber around them. On the far wall, a single, ominous door of glowing runes materialized, pulsing with a faint, malevolent light.
A low, grating sound echoed through the newly formed chamber—the sound of stone grinding against stone. Sera's head snapped toward the walls. The shadows were moving.
Humanoid figures began to pull themselves free from the stone, their forms crude and unfinished, like statues abandoned halfway through carving. Their empty eyes, devoid of light or life, fixed on the two living souls who had just trespassed into their domain. The trial had begun.