Bereft: Demise

51 | Of Places Deep Below

In the empty valleys between Terrestria's northern ranges, the universe seems to yawn wide and bellow with the void's waiting doom. The void existed everywhere and yet nowhere, just a breath beyond this world, holding back the other realms with nothing but its utter stillness. Its utter emptiness.

Darius ignored the quiet of the snow-quilted valley, each of his breaths measured, steady, and as white as the frost coating his skin. The twin ridges of the range flanking the valley spared it from the ravages of the arctic weather, but it only heightened the volume of that empty moan, that vacuum of the void breathing into this world.

The Sin was perched upon the lip of a tor as he judged the scrawled drawing in his hand with only the stars above providing illumination. The faded ink portrayed a thin valley almost identical to the one he looked upon, but the mountains in the drawing were rounder and there was a river—or what Pride thought to be a river—scribbled in the basin.

Bloody Zhen. Couldn't draw to save his life. It was possible the river had dried up and the mountains had changed through the seasons. What interested Darius was the angle of the ridges, the atypical way the range split and rejoined, creating this odd pocket with no mortally traversable egresses. Zhen and the mortal soldier's diary had both made note of it.

A trill of excitement dared spark in the creature's chest. This could be it. This was one of the last areas he had yet to search. The weapon could be here.

Like a shadow torn from the night, the creature dropped from the tor and slid upon the frozen mountainside. He skated upon the ice, arms spread for balance, and leaped the last ten feet or so to land silently in the valley's belly. The ground beneath his shoes was hard but porous, comprised of crystallized silt toughened by a thousand years of braving the elements.

Darius paced the dead river bed as his sharp eyes darted here and there among the boulders and sharp, hardy vegetation. Sunlight hadn't touched this part of the world for many days, but the moonlight emphasized the oblique lines of shadows cast by the mountain's bones. Like the ridges of a spine, one side was white and glowing, the other drawn black like the deepest night.

The Sin smelled the land, pulling great amounts of essence through himself as he tested the area and audibly sniffed. What human memories remained here were weak, possibly centuries old. They spoke only in half-utterances of a nameless terror, of an urge to flee and to leave the silent vale be. Some entity had driven them off.

Mortals are cowards. Worthless, wretched cowards.

Darius marched over the shale and iced silt, each of his footsteps snapping and breaking the rocks and dirt. His eyes were locked on the southern slope of the valley as he moved—when suddenly the ground gave beneath his weight. 

The Sin was quick enough to avoid falling into the black cavern opening underfoot. He hopped to the solid rocks embedded deep in the mountain's body but listened to patter of falling earth as the hole widened and its edges crumbled. 

A cave beneath the surface? Strange place for it to form. 

Frowning, Darius went to the edge and peered inside the inky cavern. He could see nothing, but the rocks falling into the jagged maw didn't strike the bottom for quite some time.

Stuffing the drawing into his pocket with the remnants of his map, the Sin jumped into the unknown.

Like the rocks, Darius fell through the frozen dark for a considerable time before landing. The force of impact broke several bones in his legs and spine, but he healed the damage with a miffed breath and stood, surveying the new space.