Location: Sector 4 – The Umbra (The Dark Side) Temperature: -100°C
The Umbra was not just cold; it was the definition of stillness.
It was a world where survival was a mathematical error. The surface temperature hovered at a bone-snapping -100 degrees Celsius, forcing humanity to burrow deep underground like worms in a frozen apple. Only the desperate or the foolish dared to walk the surface.
The boy was both.
He trudged through the knee-deep drifts of void-dust, his heavy coat stiff with frost. He wore no mask. He didn't need one. His lungs, evolved over generations of darkness, didn't crave oxygen like the ancestors of Earth. Instead, he inhaled the thin, nitrogen-rich mixture of the atmosphere, his chest rising and falling in a slow, efficient rhythm. The freezing air didn't burn his throat; it tasted like home. It tasted like static.
He paused and looked up.
Even here, in the eternal night, It was watching.
Dominating the sky above the horizon was the Event Horizon of The Oculus. The massive black hole bent the light of the universe around it, creating a terrifying halo of warped starlight that crowned the mountains. It was beautiful, silent, and cruel.
"Time is a lie here," the boy whispered, his voice swallowed by the wind.
He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist, but the digits were flickering, confused by the gravity waves.
It was the great unfairness of Erebos. On the Light Side—the side facing the Black Hole directly—the intense gravity dilated time. The "Illumed" lived for 200 years, their cells aging slower as they basked in the radiation. They had luxury. They had time.
Here in the Umbra? They had nothing. Life was short, brutal, and dark.
But that changes today, he thought, his hand tightening around the crumpled piece of synthetic paper in his pocket.
It was a map. A map to a ruin from the Old World—before the planet was captured by the Black Hole.
The boy resumed his march. He didn't know exactly where he was going, only that he had to keep moving. To stop was to freeze. To freeze was to die.
He wasn't a hero. He was a low-grade Wave User—barely strong enough to phase his hand through a locked door, let alone fight. If a Void Walker appeared from the shadows right now, he wouldn't be a fighter; he would be lunch.
"Just a little further," he muttered, stepping over a ridge of jagged black ice.
Below him, nestled in a crater, he saw it. The entrance to the ruin. It didn't look like much—just a shattered metal archway half-buried in the snow—but the runes etched into the metal glowed with a faint, dying blue light.
The boy grinned. He had made it. He had no idea that he was walking into a tomb.
The boy stepped through the shattered archway.
The silence inside the ruin was heavy. It wasn't the empty silence of the wind outside; it was the pressurized, waiting silence of a tomb. The air here was stagnant, preserved for centuries, tasting of rusted metal and old ozone.
He didn't need a light. As a native of the Umbra, his eyes had evolved to catch even the faintest photons. To him, the dark corridor wasn't black; it was a grayscale map of shapes and echoes.
"The Map said Sector 4, sublevel 2..." he muttered, tracing his fingers along the wall.
The metal was cold enough to burn skin, but his calloused fingertips ignored it. He walked past frozen skeletons—people from the "Old World" who had died screaming when the Black Hole first captured the planet. They were fused into the walls, victims of the Great Blink.
He ignored them. He wasn't here for ghosts. He was here for power.
He reached the central chamber.
It was a circular room, surprisingly intact. In the center, sitting on a pedestal of obsidian glass, was a small, metallic container. It hummed with a frequency that made his teeth ache.
The Runes.
The boy's heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. The legends said the Old World scientists had tried to create artificial "Observers"—machines that could control reality better than any human brain.
He approached the pedestal. His hands shook as he reached for the container.
Click.
The seal hissed. The lid popped open.
Inside, resting on a bed of dark velvet, sat a pair of eyes.
They weren't human. They were spheres of intricate, glowing blue crystal, wired with neural filaments that looked like liquid starlight. Even sitting in the box, they seemed to be looking at him.
"The Eyes of the Architect," the boy breathed. "With these... I won't just be a Wave User. I'll be a god."
He laughed. It was a jagged, desperate sound. He grabbed the container, shoving it into his heavy coat pocket. He was already calculating how much Neutronium he could sell them for in the Eventide. He would buy a heater. He would buy a ticket to the Light Side. He would—
Scrrrrrrape.
The sound came from the ceiling.
The boy froze. The laughter died in his throat.
He slowly looked up.
clinging to the ceiling above him was a shadow that didn't belong there. It was darker than the room, a patch of "Nothingness" in the shape of a man, but with too many limbs.
A Void Walker.
The creature had no face, only a single, vertical slit that glowed with a hungry violet light. It had been sleeping here, feeding on the radiation of the artifact. And now, the boy had just stolen its dinner.
"Shit," the boy whispered.
The Void Walker dropped.
It didn't fall; it poured down like thick oil, landing silently between the boy and the exit. It rose to its full height, towering over him, razor-sharp claws made of solidified darkness extending from its fingers.
The boy panicked. Instinct took over.
"Phase!" he screamed in his mind.
He triggered his Wave Arts. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force his body into Superposition. He tried to become a ghost, to turn intangible so the monster's claws would pass right through him. He felt his atoms loosening, his body becoming light as smoke.
It's working. I can slip past it.
He lunged for the door, his body turning into a blur.
But the Void Walker didn't strike. It did something worse.
It opened its eye.
The violet slit on the creature's face widened. A beam of pure, concentrated Observation hit the boy like a physical hammer.
THE LAW OF CERTAINTY.
The creature saw him. It observed him with such intensity that it forced reality to collapse.
"NO!" the boy shrieked.
His Superposition shattered. His atoms, which were trying to scatter, were violently slammed back together into solid matter. The magic failed instantly. He wasn't a ghost anymore. He was just flesh and bone.
Solid. Vulnerable. Caught.
The Void Walker didn't hesitate. It lunged, its claw swiping in a brutal, horizontal arc.
There was a wet, tearing sound.
The boy looked down. He didn't feel pain, not yet. He just felt cold. He saw his own legs standing two feet away from him.
He hit the floor hard. The container with the Blue Eyes skittered across the room, sliding into the shadows, safe and unbroken.
The boy tried to crawl, tried to scream, but his lungs were filling with blood. The Void Walker stepped over him, indifferent. It didn't even eat him. It just killed the intruder and returned to its slumber, fading back into the ceiling.
The boy lay in the dark, staring at the container he couldn't reach. The silence of the tomb returned.
So much for changing everything, he thought.
His vision blurred. The cold was no longer painful; it was a heavy, comforting blanket pulling him down into the eternal Umbra. His heartbeat slowed. Thump... thump... thump...
Just as his consciousness began to drift into the void, the metallic container on the floor buzzed.
It wasn't a mechanical sound. It was a digital chime, crisp and terrifyingly clear in the ancient silence.
The lid of the box clicked open further. The glowing blue crystal spheres—the Eyes of the Architect—rotated. They didn't look at the ceiling. They didn't look at the Void Walker.
They looked directly at the dying boy.
A beam of hard-light projected from the crystals, cutting through the darkness. It hit the boy's fading retinas, burning a message into his final moments. It wasn't a language he spoke. It was the language of the Old World. The language of machines.
A stream of zeroes and ones scrolled rapidly across his vision, pulsing in sync with his failing heart.
[SYSTEM ALERT: GENETIC MATCH FAILED] [CRITERIA: VISUAL CORTEX INCOMPATIBLE] [BROADCASTING FINAL LOG...]
The numbers flashed red, then turned a calm, deadly white.
01010011 01000101 01000101 01001011 00100000 01010100 01001000 01000101 00100000 01000010 01001100 01001001 01001110 01000100 00100000 01001111 01001110 01000101
The boy's lips moved, but no sound came out. He didn't understand. He would never understand.
The projection flickered out. The container slammed shut, locking the Eyes away once more, waiting for a better user.
The boy exhaled his final breath of nitrogen. His eyes glassed over, freezing open, staring at nothing.