They had gathered beneath the pale light of dusk—more than a dozen survivors, banded together beneath Reynard Ashford's quiet command. Though his expression remained its usual carefree calm, there was something in his eyes now. Something tired. Something urgent.
"Alright fellas, let's go," he said, his voice calm. "I have a feeling that we will find them today."
The students had seen enough: friends captured, companions wounded, the land twisted by foreign intent. They carried the burden of knowing they were the last line between chaos and what remained of order.
They followed the trail—bloody snow, scorched grass, faint residues of glyph-work. What they found at the end of it turned their stomachs.
A clearing deep in the jagged forest basin. Blackened earth surrounding a half-buried stone monolith. Students—dozens—bound to makeshift poles in a crude circular formation. Their heads slumped, a faint pulsing glow threading from their chests to the center of the ritual. It was eerily reminiscent of something.
Dawn stopped walking.
He didn't say it aloud.
But he had been here before. Not this place, but this moment—when his body was split, soul twisted, and a darkness was etched onto his very Mortal Shell. He remembered the laughter. He remembered the voice that whispered in his mind.
"They're… summoning something," Ingrid said, her voice hollow. "It's not from here."
"No," Reynard said. "And it shouldn't be here."
The cultists circled the altar—dozens of them. Their faces were painted in spiraling glyphs, each different from the last. These glyphs didn't draw from internal power—they were tools, items etched with alien symbols, channeling the will of something that never belonged in the Land of Prime.
Some of the students hesitated.
"We can't take them all," someone whispered.
"We don't have to," Reynard replied. "We just need to stop the ritual."
And they moved.
---
It was coordinated. Reynard led the charge, his bonded Drifter shimmering faintly behind his steps—a ghost of light and weight. He moved like flowing water, effortless and nonchalant, a yawn escaping even as he dropped two cultists with calculated strikes. His fists weren't divine, but they were practiced, precise, devastating.
Dawn followed close, fighting like a blade honed by necessity. No Mantle. No frame. Just a boy forged in trial, dragging fire behind his fists with sheer force of will. Gary and Ingrid flanked the sides, the former a kinetic wall, the latter a precise disruptor unraveling glyphs with spoken patterns.
But it wasn't enough.
They were too late.
The last glyph clicked.
The ritual screamed.
And the world… split.
From the center of the circle, where the students' essence had been funneled into the dark stone, something pushed outward. Not light. Not fire. Something that bent the senses—tore at the meaning of reality. Its shape was a mockery of form, flickering between flesh and symbol, claw and concept.
The cultists laughed.
One of them, glyphs carved into his skin directly, raised his arms and screamed, "The pact is broken! Hahahaha! Who will save you now!"
Ingrid's breath caught. "The Pact…?"
They had been warned of the Pact. A primordial rule that forbade any transcendent being from entering the Wilderness. A safeguard left by the first Prime. A wall of unseen law.
A wall now shattered.
"What happens if the Pact breaks?" someone asked.
No one answered.
Because none of them knew.
And deep in his bones, Dawn remembered the shadow that once whispered to him as a child. The thing that had been stopped halfway.
This time, it had come through.
And it was hungry.
The earth around the monolith caved inward, not from weight—but rejection. The very ground recoiled, trembling in shallow spasms. Snow hissed into steam. Trees withered in waves, their trunks splitting open, leaking sap that sizzled like acid.
The entity rose.
Not as a beast. Not even as a being.
It unfolded.
Like a parchment written on every side, endlessly. Its body was a shifting geometry—one moment a coil of ink-drenched limbs, the next, a lattice of screaming mouths. Glyphs crawled across its surface like parasites, each one blinking open like an eye, then vanishing.
There was no roar.
Only a silence so deep it suffocated.
Some students dropped their weapons.
Others dropped to their knees.
The Wilderness itself buckled. Ridges crumbled, snowfields shattered, and the wind turned erratic—as though the world was confused about its own rules. Birds abandoned the sky. The unnatural warmth spread, melting away the frost in oily trails. Above, the clouds twisted into a spiral, but offered no storm. Only stillness.
"No…" Ingrid whispered, stepping back. "It's not just powerful. It doesn't belong here."
Reynard didn't speak.
He couldn't.
Not because of fear—but because something in his chest refused to name it. To name a thing was to give it meaning, and this—this thing defied meaning.
Gary gritted his teeth, fists trembling. "We cannot defeat this thing!"
Dawn didn't move. His eyes locked on the entity, breath shallow. It felt familiar. Not the shape. But the pressure. A distant echo of the nightmare that broke his Mortal Shell long ago. The cultists had tried to summon it then—only partially succeeded.
But now…
Now they had finished the ritual.
And the ancient pact, the one never spoken of except in whispers and symbols etched in forbidden places—it had shattered. That veil protecting the Wilderness from transcendent invasion was gone.
And something had come through the hole.
---
To be continued…