The air was thick with ash and silence, the kind that settles after violence, heavy and absolute. I crouched low behind a jagged ruin, its edges rusted and crumbling like the bones of something long dead. My breath caught against the dry dust in my throat, and my heartbeat echoed in my ears louder than the shifting wind. The creature — the Echo Dwelle, or so it was called — was just beyond the broken column, standing motionless in the clearing. It didn't breathe, didn't twitch, didn't so much as tilt its head. It simply existed, like it belonged more to the decay of this world than I ever would. My eyes locked onto the unstable slab overhead — cracked, barely hanging by a rusted joint — and for the first time in minutes, a spark of desperation gave way to the ghost of an idea.
I didn't need to fight it. I just needed to kill it. Somehow.
I picked up a chunk of stone and flung it across the clearing, watching as it clattered against a beam and echoed like a gunshot through the stillness. The Dweller turned, not startled, but with slow certainty, as though it already knew what it would find, as though it had seen every move I would make long before I even thought them. I didn't wait for it to fully face the sound. I ran, dragging my battered body from behind the column and sprinting past the clearing, limbs heavy, lungs burning. I heard it move behind me — not fast, just inevitable. The way fate moves when it's already decided how your story ends.
I dove shoulder-first into the rusted base of the cracked pillar. Metal screamed. The weight above groaned. For a second, nothing happened, and then the slab gave way. It came down like judgment — stone on flesh, with a sound that shook the dust from the sky. The impact threw a cloud into the air thick enough to blind me. I couldn't see the result. I couldn't even move. My body throbbed with effort and old bruises and something sharp in my ribs. I lay there, half-buried under the curtain of dust, panting and hoping — really hoping — that maybe, just maybe, I'd killed it.
But hope is stupid.
A shadow moved through the grey.
It stepped through the dust with its body broken, bones protruding through the skin, ichor dripping from a cracked skull. But it walked anyway, each movement wrong, too smooth. One arm dragged uselessly behind it, the other raised in silence.
I tried to move. I didn't even see the strike — just felt the pain.
Something tore through my side like fire wrapped in steel. My body lifted from the ground and hit something hard. And then there was cold, sharp cold, and wetness. I blinked, tasted iron, and tried to push myself up.
But my left arm wouldn't respond.
I looked down.
It wasn't there.
I didn't scream — not at first. I blinked stupidly, not believing it, not really registering that the limb was gone and the blood wasn't stopping and the pain wasn't a dream. Then the sound came, involuntary and cracked and thin — less a scream than a drowning gasp from somewhere too deep to reach.
The world flickered.
And then something else took its place.
I wasn't lying on dirt anymore. I wasn't bleeding. I wasn't even sure I had a body. The world stretched open and reformed itself into something vast and unknowable, a dream made from memory and madness. There was a sky above me, but it pulsed like a wound. No stars. No sun. Just distant cracks of light that beat in rhythm like a heart. At the center of it all stood a dome made from roots and energy, massive and coiling, shifting like it was breathing — the Skyroot Dome — and I knew its name without ever having heard it. Beneath it stood figures — tall, cloaked in shadow, unmoving — all turned in my direction, as though they'd been watching for a long time.
The whispers began slowly, like wind over shattered glass. I couldn't make out the words, only the intent, like a chorus of voices arguing inside my skull, old voices, voices from things that had seen too much and remembered too little. I took a step forward, or thought I did, and the dome shuddered in response.
A sound broke through the noise.
My name.
I turned — and saw the spire.
It pierced the sky like a blade, impossibly distant and yet unmistakably close. Around it, the cracks of the sky widened, spilling yellow and blue light through the heavens like veins splitting under the skin. The air shimmered, warped, bent under a pressure I couldn't name. There was a presence here, not a person, not a god, but something ancient and unfinished. Something that had been watching me longer than I had been alive.
A voice entered my mind — clear, low, without emotion or urgency.
[Consider this your first debt.]
I froze, disoriented. The words sank in like ice through bone. They weren't just sound — they were command.
"What?" I muttered slowly, confused, afraid, angry. "Who are you?"
[That was just an Echo Dweller.]
My heart faltered.
Just?
I had nearly died — had lost an arm, had bled out, had passed into whatever this was — and it was calling that thing a test run?
The presence pulsed again. Not threatening. Just... there.
[I am your guide for this world.]
The words sounded final. Like the last nail in something sacred.
I didn't respond. Couldn't.
I simply collapsed — not out of weakness, not from pain — but from the sudden overwhelming weight of everything. Of being too small for this world. Of realizing that whatever was happening was bigger than me, bigger than anything I could've prepared for. I gave in to the exhaustion and let it take me.
When I woke, everything was wrong again — but in a different way.
I was on the ground, half-drenched in a pool of my own blood. The air was cold. The sky — it was cracked. Not metaphorically. I could see thin, jagged lines in it, like a broken shell barely holding together.
And Aelric was there.
He was licking my neck.
My cat — that lazy, grey-furred, purring bastard — licking the vein that pulsed just beneath the skin, as though drawn to something inside me. He looked up and meowed like nothing was wrong.
I moved to push him away — and froze.
My arm was back.
Not whole. Not mine, exactly. It was veined with dark lines, like roots beneath the skin, coiling up from shoulder to fingertips. It moved when I told it to — but it felt distant. Borrowed.
I swallowed, my throat dry. No pain. No fever. No sudden burst of power or stats or divine revelation.
Just one sentence, whispering beneath my skin.
[Consider this your first debt.]
And another, like a blade carving itself into my thoughts.
[I am the Fourteenth.]
The sky above pulsed with cracks of blue and yellow, light bleeding through like veins through flesh. Something far in the distance stirred — a shadow behind the spire, impossibly large.
I didn't know what any of it meant.
But I knew one thing.
I wasn't alone in my head anymore.
[End of Chapter 3 - The Whisper (3) Final]