The Chain did not merely bridge the gap between the cliff and the floating island; it hung between them like a heavy, rusted thought suspended in the dark.
Walking it was an exercise in masochism. Each link was twenty feet long and five feet wide, a flat surface of wrought iron that had been pitted by centuries of cosmic radiation. But the danger was not the rust, nor the three-mile drop into the bruised violet fog.
The danger was the residue.
The shoal of Mnestic Spores that had risen past them in the previous hour had left a film behind. It coated the iron links in a slick, bioluminescent slime—a psychic oil. It was the physical waste product of a million dissolved memories, slippery as wet ice and warm to the touch.
"Careful," Kaelen breathed, his voice muffled by his scarf. "Do not let your skin touch the iron. The oil... it soaks in."
He took the lead, his boots finding purchase on the rivet-heads of the chain links. He held the bridle of the lead Strider-beast, cooing softly to the creature. The beast was trembling, its claws clicking nervously on the wet metal.
Behind him, the wagon groaned. The iron-banded wheels rolled over the slime with a wet, sucking sound—shhh-clack, shhh-clack.
Korgath brought up the rear, his massive hands gripping the brake lever, his boots acting as anchors.
They moved into the void.
The silence here was different. On the mainland, the silence was an absence of sound. Here, suspended over the abyss, the silence was a pressure. It pressed against the eardrums, trying to force its way in. And because the Mnestic oil was everywhere—on their boots, on the wheels, vaporizing into the air they breathed—the barriers of their minds began to erode.
It started with the smell.
Elara, walking beside the wagon to lighten the load, wrinkled her nose.
"Do you smell... lilacs?" she whispered.
Kaelen didn't turn around. He focused on his feet. Left. Right. Avoid the slick spot.
"Don't chase the scent, Elara," he warned. "It's not yours."
But the warning was too late for the others. The oil was potent. It didn't just show you the memories of the dead; it lubricated the path to your own traumas, sliding the heavy doors of repression open with terrifying ease.
Korgath felt it first.
It wasn't a smell for him. It was a weight.
He took a step, and suddenly, his armor didn't weigh two hundred pounds. It weighed the world. The iron of the Chain Bridge beneath his boots vanished, replaced by the polished granite of the Deep Halls of Iron-Hold.
He stopped. The wagon jerked to a halt as his grip on the brake locked frozen.
"Korgath?" Elara's voice was distant, underwater.
The Orc didn't hear her. He was back in the Year of the Red Dust. He was standing in the shield wall, shoulder to shoulder with his brother, Durgash. The air was thick with the screams of the dying and the roar of the Tectonic Worms that the Void had twisted into siege engines.
But it wasn't the monsters that broke them. It was the betrayal of the stone.
In his memory, Korgath looked up. The ceiling of the Deep Hall—the immutable, protective sky of his people—was cracking. Not from force, but from rot. The stone was turning soft, dripping like grey wax. The mountain itself had lost the will to be solid.
"Hold!" Durgash screamed beside him. "The line must hold!"
Korgath raised his shield. He felt the impact of a worm-tooth, the shock vibrating through his bones. But then he looked at his own arm. The plate armor, forged by the Grand Smiths, was rusting in real-time. The entropy was eating his protection.
He watched, helpless, as his brother's breastplate turned to dust, exposing the green flesh beneath to the biting acid of the Void-spit. Durgash fell, not because he was weak, but because his steel had forgotten how to be hard.
"The metal lies," Korgath whispered in the present, his eyes squeezed shut behind his goggles. Tears leaked out, mixing with the condensation in his mask. "The stone lies. Strength is a myth."
On the bridge, the wagon began to slide backward. The incline of the chain was slight, but the oil made it treacherous.
"Korgath!" Kaelen's shout cut through the hallucination. "The brake! You're crushing the axle!"
The Orc gasped, the air rushing into his lungs tasting of ozone, not the granite dust of his home. He blinked, the vision of his dying brother fading into the purple fog of the Severance.
He looked at his hands. They were gripping the brake lever so hard the iron was bending.
"I am... here," Korgath rumbled. He released the tension, just enough to let the wheels roll. "I am here. The metal is cold. The metal holds."
He repeated it like a mantra, a prayer to a dead god of smithing. The metal holds.
They walked for another mile. The chain dipped lower, reaching the nadir of the arc where the gravity of the Void was strongest. The debris field below them seemed closer now. Elara could see the ruins of a floating library, books fluttering like white birds in the windless air.
Vanya stumbled.
She didn't trip over a physical obstacle. She tripped over a sound that wasn't there.
Elara reached out and caught the elf's arm. Vanya's skin was ice cold, and she was trembling so violently that her teeth chattered.
"Vanya?"
"The note," Vanya wept, her blindfolded face turned toward the empty sky. "I can't find the note."
Vanya was no longer on the chain. She was kneeling on the marble floor of the Silver Spire. She was wearing the white vestments of a High Chanter, and she was singing the Morning Hymn—the song that, for three thousand years, had called the sun over the horizon.
In the memory, the choir was three hundred strong. Their voices were a pillar of pure harmony, a physical force that kept the darkness at bay.
Then, the Severance.
It didn't happen with an explosion. It happened with a discordance. One by one, the voices failed. Not because the singers stopped, but because the magic that carried the sound evaporated.
Vanya opened her mouth to sing the high crescendo, the note that signaled the dawn. But no sound came out. The air refused to carry the vibration. The acoustics of the universe had changed.
She watched the High Priestess, her mother, clutch her throat. She watched the golden mana that flowed through the temple veins turn black and sluggish. The stained glass windows, depicting the glorious history of the Elves, simply turned grey. The color drained out of the world in a single heartbeat.
Silence. Absolute, suffocating silence. The sun did not rise.
"It's gone," Vanya sobbed, clutching Elara's arm with a grip that left bruises. "The music is gone. We are singing into a grave."
"Vanya, listen to me," Elara said, her voice shaking. She looked at Kaelen for help, but the Ranger was staring ahead, his body rigid. Elara had to do this.
"Listen to the wagon," Elara said. "Listen to the wheels. Shhh-clack. Shhh-clack. That's a rhythm. That's a sound."
Vanya tilted her head. She focused on the grinding of the iron against the slime. It was an ugly sound. A mechanical, grinding, miserable sound.
But it was real.
"A dirge," Vanya whispered, her breathing hitching. "It is a dirge."
"It's a beat," Elara insisted. "Walk to it."
Vanya nodded slowly. She took a step. Then another. She synced her movement to the grinding of the wheels, replacing the memory of the divine hymn with the reality of the rust.
Kaelen was the furthest ahead. He was the guide. He had to be the anchor.
But the oil on the chain was thickest here, pooling in the depressions of the metal links. The vapor was rising directly into his face.
He stopped.
He raised his spyglass to check the tension of the chain ahead, but he didn't see the iron.
Through the lens, he saw the faces of the 7th Survey Corps.
He was back in the swamps of the Green-Rot. Five years ago. He was the Commander then. He wasn't a scavenger; he was a soldier who still believed that the world could be fixed if you just applied enough logistics.
"Commander," the voice of his lieutenant, Sarah, whispered in his ear. "The map says there's a shelter. The probability is 88%."
Kaelen looked at the map in his memory. He looked at the terrain. His Audit—younger then, less cynical—agreed. 88%. High confidence.
"We push," memory-Kaelen said. "We can save them."
They were carrying refugees. Children.
They pushed. They reached the coordinates.
There was no shelter. The map was from before the Shift. The terrain had migrated. Instead of a bunker, there was a nest of Null-Stalkers.
He remembered the math changing. He watched the numbers in his vision plummet from 88% Survival to 0%.
He watched Sarah die. He watched the refugees die. He watched them get pulled apart by things that looked like shadows and teeth. He fired his crossbow until the string snapped. He threw his last potion.
It didn't matter. The math didn't care about his intentions. Hope was the variable that had killed them. If he had been cynical, if he had turned back, they would have lived.
"The numbers lied," Kaelen hissed, gripping the bridle of the beast so hard the leather creaked. He was shaking. "The probability was a trap."
He stood on the chain, paralyzed. In his mind, the path ahead was 0%. Every step was a trap. If he moved, Elara would die. If he moved, Vanya would break.
"Kaelen!"
The voice was sharp. Real.
He blinked. Elara was standing beside him. She had left the safety of the wagon's side. She was looking at him with eyes that were terrified but clear.
"You're counting," she said. "I can see your lips moving. stop counting."
Kaelen looked at her. The overlay of the Audit was a chaotic storm of red numbers. Risk: Critical. Structural Integrity: Failing. Hope: Error.
"The math says we die," Kaelen rasped. "The math says the chain snaps in forty steps."
"The chain doesn't know math," Elara said. She reached out and touched his gloved hand. "It's just iron. Look at it. It's rusty and ugly and thick. It's been here for a hundred years. It's not going to break just because you're scared."
Kaelen looked at the chain. Really looked at it.
He saw the rust scales. He saw the weld marks from some long-dead smith. He saw the Mnestic oil glistening on the surface.
He forced his mind to reboot. He forced the Audit to strip away the probability and look at the material.
Iron. Wrought. Cold.
"You're right," Kaelen exhaled, the breath shuddering out of him. "It's just iron."
He lowered the spyglass. The ghosts of the 7th Survey Corps faded back into the swamp of his memory.
"Get back to the wagon," he ordered, his voice returning to its usual gravelly rasp. "Don't walk so close to the edge."
They pushed through the mire of memory. It took another hour to cross the final mile, an hour of fighting the urge to weep, to scream, to curl up on the cold metal and let the past take them.
But they kept moving. Korgath anchored the rear. Vanya walked to the rhythm of the dirge. Kaelen watched the iron, not the numbers.
And then, the chain ended.
It disappeared into a massive concrete bulkhead embedded in the floating earth of Sector 7.
The wheels rolled off the metal and onto solid, packed red dirt.
The silence of the void receded, replaced by the low, ambient hum of the floating island. Here, gravity was artificial, generated by the massive engines deep within the crust. It felt heavy, pulling at their weary muscles.
Kaelen halted the wagon ten yards inland. He dropped the reins and fell to his knees. He didn't kiss the ground—the ground was toxic red dust—but he put his hands on it to make sure it didn't move.
Korgath slumped against the wagon, his breathing apparatus wheezing loudly. He patted his chestplate, checking that the steel was still hard.
Vanya sat on the tailgate, removing her blindfold. Her eyes were red-rimmed and hollow.
"We crossed," Elara whispered. She looked back at the bridge.
The chain disappeared into the purple fog. From here, it looked impossible. A thread over nothing.
"We didn't cross," Kaelen corrected, standing up slowly and brushing the red dust from his knees. He checked his pocket watch. The glass face was still cracked. "We survived the crossing. There is a difference."
He looked at the landscape of Sector 7.
It was a scrapyard of giants. Massive skeletal towers of steel rose into the sky, half-eaten by rust. Pipelines the size of rivers snaked across the ground. And everywhere, there was the smell of oil and decay.
But there was something else, too.
In the distance, nestled among the wreckage of a collapsed factory, there was a light. Not the pale, ghostly light of the Mnestic Spores.
It was an orange light. A fire.
"Smoke," Korgath rumbled, pointing a thick finger. "Cooking smoke."
Kaelen squinted. "That's not possible. Sector 7 is a dead zone. The records say the atmosphere scrubbers failed a decade ago."
"Maybe the records are wrong," Elara said softly. "Like the map."
Kaelen looked at her. He looked at the smoke.
"Maybe," he conceded.
He opened his Ledger. He dipped his quill in the inkwell clipped to his belt.
Day 14. Location: Sector 7. Assets: 3 Sanity, 1 Wagon, 4 Lives. Debts: Innumerable. Status: Still moving.
He snapped the book shut.
"We camp here," Kaelen said. "Tomorrow, we find out who is lighting fires in a graveyard."