The first few days were a lesson in the geography of absence. Kaelen walked east, following the archaic lines of Elder Jin’s map, and with each step, the thin thread connecting him to Dust-hollow, to Lyra, stretched tauter, threatening to snap. The landscape itself seemed to reject him. The gentle, rolling hills around the village gave way to rocky, wind-scoured ridges and tangled, thorny thickets that snagged his cloak and left fine cuts on his exposed skin. The sun was a pale, indifferent eye, offering light but little warmth. Nights were cold, forcing him to huddle in the lee of boulders, his thin cloak inadequate, listening to the lonely calls of night birds and the scuttling of unseen things in the underbrush.
He walked with his left arm cradled against his ribs, a constant, dull ache a reminder of the shadow wolf and the life he had left behind. The wound was healing, but the tissue was tight and inflexible. He practiced raising it in small increments while he walked, grimacing as it protested. He could not afford another such injury. His survival depended on being able to use both hands, on speed and cunning rather than brute strength.
The map was his only companion. It was drawn on something that felt like human skin, tough and slightly greasy to the touch. The dried-blood ink had a faint, coppery scent that sometimes made his void core hum in resonance. The symbols were a nightmare of jagged lines and dots that seemed to shift when viewed from the corner of his eye. He followed the path from the Thornback Ridge, a familiar, jagged spine of rock to the northeast of Dust-hollow, into uncharted territory. The map showed the path dipping southward, then cutting east across a region of symbols he could not decipher, before reaching the shaded expanse of the Whispering Wastes. The Heart of the Stillness was not marked. It was a destination he had to find by feeling, by instinct. The thought was terrifying.
Food dwindled. He ate sparingly, the dried meat growing tough and tasteless. Water was found in trickling streams, often murky and tasting of iron. He tested each trickle with the void sense Elder Jin had encouraged him to develop—a faint, inner perception of the spiritual currents in the world around him. Most water felt clean, a faint, cool hum of natural energy. Once, near a stagnant pool, he felt a sour, viscous quality that made his stomach turn. He avoided it. The skills were crude, a survivalist’s toolkit, but they were his.
On the third day, he reached the edge of what the map marked as the ‘Bones of Giants’—a field of weathered, pale stone formations that jutted from the earth like broken teeth. It was a desolate place, the wind whistling through the stones with a mournful, constant song. It was here, according to the map, that the true danger began. The Wastes were not far beyond.
He was picking his way carefully through a narrow channel between two towering stones when the smell hit him—a thick, musky odor of wet fur and rot. His void sense prickled, a sensation like static on his skin. Danger.
He froze, dropping low behind a stone outcrop. The sound of heavy breathing, of flesh dragging over rock, came from the next passage over. He peered through a crack in the stone.
The creature that lumbered into view was unlike anything he had faced. It was a mire-ghast, a Tier 3 beast, a bloated, quadrupedal thing the size of a large cart. Its hide was a mottled gray-green, caked with mud and slime, and bristled with coarse, iron-hard quills along its spine. Its head was a blunt, boneless mass of flesh dominated by a triple row of serrated, grinding teeth, and its eyes were small, piggy, and yellow, glowing with a dull, malevolent intelligence. It wasn’t hunting him. It was patrolling, a grizzled beast defending its territory.
Kaelen’s blood ran cold. Tier 3. The shadow wolf had been a cunning Tier 2. This was a tank, a brute of raw power and durability. His hatchet would be useless against that hide. His healing arm was a liability. Running was likely faster, but not faster than a charging mire-ghast.
The beast turned its massive head, its piggy eyes sweeping the channel. It must have scented him. A low, guttural growl rumbled from its chest, a sound that vibrated in Kaelen’s bones. It began to move toward his hiding spot, its gait a shambling, inexorable roll.
Panic flared, hot and sharp, but he crushed it. Panic was death. Elder Jin’s words echoed: Draw less, and draw cleanly. Tame it, or it will break you.
He had no time for a clean draw. He had to survive.
He burst from cover, not away from the beast, but to the side, toward a cluster of narrow, vertical stones the mire-ghast was too wide to easily follow. The ghast let out a roar of fury and charged, its quills flaring. The ground shook with its steps. Kaelen sprinted, his good hand pumping, his injured arm held tight. He reached the stones and squeezed into a gap barely wider than his shoulders. The mire-ghast slammed into the opposite side of the formation, the impact sending a shower of dust and pebbles down on him. Its head, a maw of teeth, thrust into the gap after him, its hot, foul breath washing over his face.
He was trapped. The stones held him, but they also held the beast’s head. For a moment, they were eye to eye. He saw the dull hunger in its yellow gaze. He smelled the blood and rot on its breath.
Take, the void whispered, the instinctive command rising from the darkest part of him.
This was not the controlled trickle from the boar. This was desperation. He reached out, not with his hand, but with his core, and he ripped.
The essence didn’t trickle. It gushed. A torrent of brutal, coarse power, thick with the beast’s rage and its earthy, muddy vitality, flooded into him. It was like drinking a river of mud. It tore through his meridians, a searing, agonizing flood that made the shadow wolf’s essence feel like a whisper. His muscles bunched, swelling with raw strength. His senses exploded. He could hear the blood pumping in the beast’s thick veins, smell the sour rot deep in its gut, see the individual quills on its head as if they were trees.
The pain in his arm vanished, replaced by a terrifying, exhilarating sense of limitless power. The stones around him seemed fragile. He seemed fragile. The void core itself groaned under the strain, a vessel filled past its limit.
The beast tried to withdraw its head, but he was faster. Propelled by stolen strength, he lunged forward, his hatchet coming free in a blur. He didn’t strike the impenetrable hide or the skull. He drove the blade into the soft, vulnerable tissue of the creature’s left eye, with all the strength of a Tier 3 beast behind the blow.
The mire-ghast screamed. It was a sound of pure agony that shattered the air. It wrenched its head back, tearing the hatchet from Kaelen’s grip and leaving it embedded in the ruined socket. Blood and vitreous humor sprayed over him. The beast thrashed wildly, its massive body smashing against the stones, cracking them. Kaelen scrambled backward out of the gap just as the formation partially collapsed, tons of rock shifting with a deafening groan.
He was clear, but the beast was still alive, maddened with pain. It turned, its one good eye fixing on him with murderous intent. It charged again, a wounded, raging missile.
Kaelen stood his ground, his body thrumming with the wild, painful energy. He had no weapon. He had nothing but the power he had stolen. As the ghast’s maw opened before him, he didn’t try to fight its strength with his own. He did what Elder Jin had hinted at. He didn’t draw from the beast; he pushed.
He extended the void not inward, but outward, in a desperate, instinctive spasm. For a split second, a field of absolute nothing pulsed from his core. It wasn’t a force of destruction. It was a zone of cessation. The ambient spiritual energy in the air around the beast’s path simply… stopped. The connection between the mire-ghast’s flesh and its own life force was momentarily severed.
The effect was not on the beast’s body, but its spirit. Mid-charge, the mire-ghast’s eyes glazed. Its coordination vanished. Its forward momentum, unguided, carried it stumbling past Kaelen, its powerful legs failing. It crashed into a boulder with a wet, final crunch, its neck snapping with an audible pop. The great beast slid to the ground, twitching once, then was still.
The field collapsed. The backlash was instantaneous and brutal.
All the stolen power, the wild, borrowed strength, fled Kaelen’s body in a torrent. It felt like his marrow was being scooped out. The pain returned tenfold, a symphony of agony in every healed but torn muscle, in his cracked ribs, in his overtaxed heart. The world swam in a dizzying, gray haze. His legs gave way. He fell to his knees, his vision tunneling. A coppery taste flooded his mouth. He retched, vomiting a thin, bloody bile onto the rocky ground.
He collapsed forward, his forehead pressing against the cold stone, his body wracked with tremors. The sun was a distant smear of light. The wind howled through the stones, sounding now like mocking laughter. He was empty. Hollowed out. The Void Shard in his pocket was cool against his leg, its faint pulse the only thing that felt real.
Lyra… The thought was a fading spark in the darkness of his exhaustion. He had to keep going. He had to…
But his body refused. The world tilted, the stones and the dead beast blurring into a single, smearing canvas of gray and green. With the last of his strength, he dragged himself a few more feet, away from the kill and the scent of blood that would attract scavengers. He crawled toward the shadowed edge of the Bones of Giants, where the land dipped into a shallow, wind-blasted depression. Beyond it, he could see it—the first, twisted, stunted trees of a dark and corrupted forest, their leaves a sickly black-green, their branches clawing at the sky. The border of the Whispering Wastes.
He made it to the edge of the depression and could go no further. His limbs were leaden, his consciousness fraying. He curled onto his side, the coarse cloak his only bedding, his pack a hard pillow beneath his head. The last thing he saw was the black, twisted canopy of the Wastes, a silent, waiting maw. The last thing he felt was the deep, aching void in his core, a hunger now greater and more terrifying than before.