The Grayscale Shroud rose ahead like a dying god's veil, quivering at its edges, full of things that remembered what it meant to be men and forgot it halfway through.
Lucian slowed but did not stop again.
The bike, loyal and pulsing with the low hum of forbidden magitech, didn't waver beneath him. Its curved, deer-like antlers, cast long shadows through the thickening air, their blue maglights flickering like breath in winter.
He gripped the throttle tighter, the bone charm at his wrist cold as grief, and reached toward the bronze cage on his belt where Ashlan, the Breaker of Fog, was.
At a whisper of touch, the relic awoke.
Lucian revved the bike once, magitech circuits and the antlers twitching with blue sparks along the grips.
Then he leaned forward and entered the fog.
The Shroud did not let them in.
It consumed them.
Instantly, the world blurred.
Color vanished first, leached from skin, stone, sky. Then came silence. True silence. Not the stillness of absence, but the pressure of it. The weight of something watching from inside the fog, eyeless and aching.
One heartbeat he was on broken road, the next, adrift in a place that wasn't really a place. The fog was not wet. Not dry. Not real. Yet it coiled around Lucian's shoulders, tugging at the seams of his shape like it meant to unravel him one thread at a time.
Something tugged at his consciousness, the weight of the shift was overwhelming, as if trying to consume Lucian's thoughts, memories even his sense of self. But he resisted. He has gone through this several times. He need to remember, keep reciting who he was, keep his focus clear.
His bike hummed low as it moved, gliding over terrain that shifted beneath its wheels. Sometimes gravel, sometimes bone, sometimes ink-black water. The lantern at his belt pulsed gently, casting narrow beams that cut through the mist like memory stitched into shadow.
Lucian would not have been able to see the way if it were not for the beams of the lantern. Infact he was seeing nothing,only momentarily, in the dense darkness; he just followed what the lantern showed him.
The teardrop-shaped, blue bone charm around his wrist flared cold.
Whispers rose around him.
Voices. Familiar and not.
He felt the pressure of things moving through the fog beside him, shapes that didn't walk, they swam through shadow. But they did not touch him. Did not scream. Did not attack.
They followed.
Something whispered in the space beside his head:
"We see you, Bound One. Keep the name. Stay in the line."
Lucian said nothing.
The map in his pocket grew heavier with each step, as if the path were rewriting itself beneath him. The map and the Ashlan worked hand in hand. It drew the path and Ashlan lightened it.
The fog shifted. Sometimes it looked like rain. Sometimes like smoke. Sometimes like fingers.
Time didn't pass here. It curdled.
Once, he saw a flicker of a tower that hadn't existed in two centuries. Another time, a ruined Dominion checkpoint with skeletons seated calmly at the desk, still wearing uniforms.
Lucian's Remnant Sight flickered, trying to catch a leftover glimpse of his target, but the shroud was too dense, too overcrowded with such images, with people who have lost to it, who have become mere slaves of this place. These are the people who got distracted, who forgot who they were, and were consumed by the shroud and turned into something that the living despised.
He failed at seeing Darius but he did see his path ahead as the Ashlan gave power to his Remnnt Sight.
Glyphs and veins of light appeared just ahead of his tires, shifting left and right depending on where he looked. The path wasn't fixed, it responded to memory, to instinct and to his artifact.
The first sign of pursuit came as a flicker, like a shadow twitching inside his head.
The second sign came with the scream. Not a scream of pain, but of loss.
It tore through the fog like a blade through silk, high and hollow. Lucian's lantern flared. His bike wobbled, narrowly avoiding a chasm that hadn't been there a second ago.
Something was following him.
It moved beneath the road, beneath memory itself.
Lucian leaned forward, accelerating. He didn't look back.
But he heard it.
Teeth that didn't fit inside a mouth. Wings made of severed voices. Eyes that weren't eyes but holes burned into the fabric of forgetting.
The Shroud-Wraith.
One of the many predators of the Grayscale. Born from someone who had tried to cross the Shroud without remembering who they were.
Lucian held steady.
Ahead, the road narrowed into an old overpass from a time that no longer existed. Pillars rose on either side, etched with names that flickered and vanished. He gunned the bike forward, weaving between support beams that twisted inward, into geometry that broke logic.
The Wraith screamed again, closer.
Lucian yanked the bike into a sharp slide. The tires skidded across memory-glass, his lantern bouncing against his thigh, flaring with desperate light.
The charm, The Mourner's Name glowed hot.
And the dead appeared.
They didn't speak.
They simply stepped from the fog, pale, grave-eyed, and utterly still. They stood between Lucian and the Wraith, their presence sudden, immense.
The Wraith skidded to a halt.
Lucian didn't wait to see the outcome.
He surged forward.
The dead turned back into mist.
At another time, the fog parted for a heartbeat.
He saw a child walking upside-down along the ceiling of the sky, her hands full of bleeding flowers. She waved. The moment vanished.
Once, the bike swerved on its own, just slightly, to avoid a shadow coiled in the shape of a cathedral's teeth. It hissed, then vanished as the bone charm flared.
Lucian leaned forward, whispering into the wind that wasn't wind, "We keep moving."
The relic flickered.
The bike answered.
And then, without warning, the fog broke. The shroud ended.
Stone appeared beneath the wheels, broken, cracked, but real. Ahead, rising out of the mist like a secret that had grown tired of hiding, stood a shattered long path tangled in dead ivy and frostroot vines. Dominion glyphs faded across both sides.
The only path to the Blackthorn Slums. It was a bridge above a river crossing the shroud.