There were no straight paths anymore.
Kalem knew it the moment he crossed into the hollow beneath the obsidian ridge, where the terrain sagged like something gutted and forgotten. The deeper he walked, the less the world obeyed.
Walls folded like paper and then snapped back into towering cliffs. Staircases twisted into loops and climbed down instead of up. Even the air pulsed in spirals, thick with mana that shimmered like oil on water, bending light and sound.
His own footsteps began echoing wrong—before he took them.
Kalem stood still, one hand resting on the hilt of his reforged fire sword, his body stilled by a creeping understanding: logic was gone here. Geometry itself had betrayed him.
"There's no up or down," he muttered, narrowing his eyes.
"You're catching on."
"Nothing holds."
"Everything folds."
"We told you."
"Again. Again. Again."
He turned slowly, senses sharpened, trying not to let the nausea catch hold. It wasn't just visual. The feel of the Abyss had changed—like walking through a memory in the middle of forming, fragile and wrong. Gravity leaned sideways. Heat was cold. Blood ran backward in his veins.
He took another step. And fell sideways.
Kalem landed hard, shoulder-first into a wall—or maybe it was a ceiling?—before rolling upright again onto what felt like floor. He stood, swaying, disoriented but intact.
He wasn't even bleeding.
Of course.
The walls stretched on forever in every direction, stone and bone meshing into impossible angles—curved spires that disappeared into themselves, jagged arcs that vanished if he looked too long. Some shapes looked like buildings at a glance… but shifted into skeletal ribs or molten spirals when he moved.
The voices followed. Louder now. But fragmented.
"Behind you."
"Before you."
"You were here already."
"You'll never leave."
"Try again."
He turned—nothing. Just more corridors, more fractured spaces.
He gritted his teeth. "I'm not lost."
"You are. But it's okay."
"Lost is how you learn here."
"Do you like your shape?"
Kalem ignored them and pressed forward, watching the shadows flicker wrong around him. He kept to landmarks—spikes, glyphs, fractures in the stone—but even those warped behind him.
He passed a pool of mercury-like liquid, where his reflection stared up, delayed by several seconds.
It blinked when he didn't.
Kalem snarled and turned away.
"This is a test," he said aloud. "This place… it's trying to make me question my own mind."
"It's working."
"Are you sure?"
"Is that your voice?"
Kalem spun on instinct—sword drawn, flame bursting from the edge.
Something screamed behind a broken archway, but no shape revealed itself.
Not flesh. Not shadow.
Just absence.
He lowered the blade.
No enemies. Just space itself.
Eventually, he came upon something that looked like a door—massive, stone, fused with teeth and glyphs that pulsed like arteries. But when he stepped through it, he emerged back at the gate.
His breath caught.
He looked back through the way he'd come. The corridor was gone. Now it was just a chasm.
He was moving in circles.
"Is this even time anymore?" Kalem asked.
He looked at his hands. They were trembling. But not from fear. From rage.
"I don't have time for this."
He stabbed the fire sword into the ground, letting it blaze for a moment, lighting the impossible world around him. The stone walls howled as flame surged—not burned, but reacting. The environment bent away, shivered, echoed with a sound like breaking bones underwater.
In that brief clarity, he saw something.
A pattern. Woven into the walls.
Runes. Arcs. Fractals.
They weren't random.
They were coordinates.
This entire space is layered.
Two overlapping worlds, existing in the same geography but vibrating at different frequencies of mana.
Kalem blinked. His heart pounded. "The Abyss isn't just deep," he whispered. "It's… recursive."
The gate he had come from wasn't just a wall. It was an anchor. Something holding the two layers together. One older. One newer. Both rotten.
"And I'm stuck between them."
"You're learning."
"Welcome home."
"Not yet. Almost."
Kalem touched one of the glowing runes, tracing the patterns. The older mana—thicker, denser—coursed beneath the modern enchantments like roots under stone.
He closed his eyes.
Let it flow into him.
Images. Fragments.
A tower collapsing into itself. A face with no features screaming in reverse. A forest made of spines. A world rewritten over and over until the first draft was still screaming beneath the last.
Kalem staggered back.
His mouth tasted like ash. His eyes burned.
But he understood now.
This world wasn't made wrong.
It had been broken and repaired badly—again and again, until the laws of reality frayed like rotten rope. The Abyss was a palimpsest of horrors.
Each gate held back one layer.
The one he stood at was merely the last seal. Not the oldest.
And he was already starting to hear something behind it.
A breath.
A memory.
A hunger.
He glanced behind him again. No visible exit. No sky. Just more recursive chambers, more impossible folds.
He pressed a palm against his chest plate. The Lynthian crystal inside still hummed faintly, though he could feel it degrading.
Not much time left.
His body wasn't falling apart. But his mind?
Even steel bends under infinite pressure.
"I need to forge the key," Kalem said, his voice low.
"No key."
"No lock."
"Break it open."
"Become the wedge."
He stepped forward again, deeper into the warping structure.
His fire still burned. His body still obeyed.
But the walls had begun to whisper his name.
And the echoes came before he spoke.