The meadow was quiet except for the slow trickle of water spilling from a tin can. Noah stood near the roots of the massive tree, his back slightly hunched as he tipped the spout, letting it soak into the earth.
Jasper's boots pressed into the grass behind him. The sound made Noah stiffen, shoulders tensing, body angled like a cornered animal. Then he turned, eyes narrowing for a breath before recognition settled in. His posture eased. He set the can down carefully and lowered himself to sit against the bark.
He waved Jasper closer. A faint smirk tugged at the edge of his mouth.
"Well, if it isn't the great leader of our little revolution. How's the army treating you?"
Jasper sighed, shoving his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. He rocked on his heels before answering, voice flat. "Fine enough. Had to kill a couple of Civil Control, ditch the bodies, but other than that? Quiet. Nothing big."
Noah nodded, pulling in a long breath through his nose. His eyes stayed on Jasper. "Any signs of Evodil? Or James?"
"No." Jasper shook his head. "Haven't seen either of them since they kicked me out of the Citadel."
For a moment, Noah tilted his head, studying him. Then he chuckled low into his palm, gaze dropping to the dirt. His hand came down against the tree's roots with a soft slap, fingers drumming once against the bark.
Noah looked back up at him, adjusting his glasses with one finger.
"So. What are you using these days to fight with?"
Jasper shrugged. "Knives. Machetes. Whatever I can get my hands on. My katana's gone, so… not like I've got options. Same as the others."
Noah nodded slowly, his hand brushing against the tree's bark as he thought. His fingers tapped along the grain like he was already sketching something in his head.
Jasper broke the silence first. "And… how's she doing these days?"
Noah's eyes widened a fraction behind the lenses. For a heartbeat his composure slipped. Then he smiled faintly, a heavy exhale slipping past his lips. "Ariela's fine."
Silence again. Jasper waiting. Noah thinking.
Then Noah snapped his fingers.
In the air before Jasper, something flickered into being — a faint shimmer, a shape forming out of nothing. Stone first. Then wood. Then metal folding in on itself, steel glinting as it stretched and refined. A ruby winked red in the hilt as the shape solidified.
A katana. Not his. Not the one he'd lost. But close enough.
Jasper stared, caught between awe and unease, as Noah pushed himself back to his feet and brushed dirt from his pants.
"There's an old dome," Noah said, his tone shifting into command. "Far outside the city. Forgotten. If we find something inside it, we might use it. The way Evodil used what he found there."
Jasper looked at Noah for a long moment, then back at the blade.
He reached out and took it, fingers curling around the hilt. The weight settled into his palm. He gave it a few slow swings, testing the balance, the edge. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing unnatural. Just a katana.
And that was enough.
For now, it was all he needed. The mission sounded simple. Easier than the rest of his life had been. And he needed easy.
Noah's eyes flicked up and down, measuring him. "Head northwest. You might find it that way. I don't know the exact spot. Never been there myself."
Jasper froze, staring at him with a mix of confusion and frustration. Sent on a lead built on nothing but chance. He met Noah's gaze straight on, but no words came. Only a short wave as he strapped the blade to his belt.
He turned away, moving toward the ring of spiral trees that enclosed the meadow. Their twisted trunks and strange leaves loomed over him, branches bent in patterns that didn't belong to this world. They were the last trees left from the underground city, carried up as remnants, stubborn survivors.
And as the community below shrank, piece by piece, day by day, Jasper stepped into the shadow of what still remained.
The path curved down through the city of broken buildings. Mismatched walls of wood and rusted metal leaned against each other, patched with slabs of fractured concrete. Nothing lined up. Nothing gleamed. But everything held together. The people moved through it slowly, some limping, some bandaged, but alive. Alive, and keeping the place clean as if that was its own victory.
Jasper passed one of the mothers standing near a doorway, cradling her infant against her chest. He raised a hand and gave her a small smile.
"How's little Ethan doing?"
She exhaled, tired but steady, and waved back. As Jasper stepped closer, she shifted the child slightly, speaking low. "He's growing fine. But his father… still hasn't come back from the main city. I'm worried. It's been too long."
Jasper nodded, resting a hand lightly on her shoulder. His eyes went to the child, and the smile returned, softer this time. "He'll be fine. I'll make sure he's back by nine tonight."
The mother blinked, then nodded, the faintest relief breaking through her worry. "Thank you."
Jasper gave her one last reassuring look before pulling his hand away, turning back to the path that wound out of the city.
The gravel crunched under his boots as Jasper made his way up the path. He glanced back once more at the broken city, the place he now called home.
Darkness covered most of it, but even in that darkness, the light still burned. Not just the lamps strung between leaning walls, but the people themselves. Their voices, their breath, their determination — brighter than anything Evodil or James had ever built.
That light gave him hope.
Hope not only to stop what was happening, but to turn everything back, to give these people their dreams again.
A few doors creaked open behind him. First a child, then a woman holding another by the hand. An old man leaning on a cane. More followed, filling the street in small clusters. They waved as he walked, calling out to him.
"Come back safe!"
"We're counting on you!"
"Bring him home, Jasper!"
"You can do it!"
The words blurred together in the night, their strength louder than their clarity.
Jasper slowed for a moment, his chest pulling tight, then pushed on until he reached the last lamp post. Its glow washed him in pale light, the final circle before only darkness lay ahead.
He stopped.
Turning, he faced them all — children perched on steps, mothers clutching infants, the elderly steadying each other's arms. The whole of what remained, staring at him, waiting.
A wide smirk split his face. He raised his arm high and waved, his voice cutting through the dark with all the force he could drag out of himself.
"I'll bring Evodil back! I'll bring all of this back to normal! I'll be the hero this city needs — and I promise you, I'll come back!"
The crowd erupted. Cheers, clapping, shouts of his name. A child leapt and waved both arms, an old man raised his cane like a banner.
Jasper stood in that final pool of light for a heartbeat longer, letting it warm his back. Then he turned, and stepped into the dark.
Jasper pushed on into the dark, his boots pressing against stone that seemed to swallow the sound. No lamps. No flashlights. Just black stretching on forever.
He finally drew the katana Noah had made for him, gripping the hilt tight as he lifted it ahead. "Alright," he muttered under his breath, "time to see if this damn thing works."
For a moment, nothing. Just the void pressing in on every side. Then a flicker — a brief spark of orange licking across the blade before snuffing out. He narrowed his eyes, adjusted his grip, pushed it forward again. Another spark. Then another.
The temperature shifted, air warming around him, sweat starting to gather on his brow. Fire flared. Then the metal glowed, bursting into white-blue light that seared against the dark.
Jasper smirked, a small curl of satisfaction tugging at his lips. "Knew you had it in you."
No one was there to hear it, and that was fine.
He pressed on, the blade cutting through the shadows with its glow. The ground beneath his boots was rougher than the stone back in the city — uneven, brittle in places, hollow enough that every step felt like he was one bad jump away from crashing through into another cavern.
The thought made him huff, shoulders shaking with a humorless laugh. Hell of a way to go, adding 'fell into a pit' to the list. Guess I'm nothing if not creative with death options.
Still, he kept moving. One step at a time, eyes sweeping the darkness, checking corners that didn't exist, glancing at the blade every few seconds just to make sure the light didn't fade.
The city was long behind him now, its lamps swallowed. The silence pressed tighter, the emptiness closing in. And with it came the bite of regret.
No map. No compass. Not even a half-decent set of directions.
"Damn archer," he muttered, tightening his grip on the glowing blade. "Figures he'd send me off blind."
He pushed forward with the blade, holding it straight in front of him like it alone could part the dark. His voice rang out, cracked and echoing against the cavern walls.
"Come on, Jasper. You're the hero of humanity. First follower of the sun. The revolutionary."
The words sounded strong, but inside, they cracked apart. All he really wanted was to go home, scrape together a bowl of root soup, crawl into bed, and pull the blanket over his head to hide from spiders.
Tears pricked his eyes, blurring the glow of the katana as he laughed them off. His free hand waved frantically in front of his face, trying to shoo the weakness away. Still, his body shook, shoulders trembling with every step.
Then came the noise. Louder than his heart, sharper than the rasp of his breath.
He panicked. Screamed — a high, sharp note that could've belonged to Caroline herself — and hurled the katana with all the force he had. The blade whistled through the dark, slammed into its target, and stuck there with a heavy clang.
Jasper froze, chest heaving.
The "enemy" was a pebble. Just a stone that had dropped from the cavern ceiling and clattered across the floor.
He stared. Then laughed again — rough, unsteady, the sound bouncing against the stone like mockery. Of course. Fate had always had a sick sense of humor.
The first human in Menystria. And he had to be the one with the most mental problems.
The others back in the city? Living better than he was. Even the so-called revolutionaries had easier missions — stealing food, torching forests, tagging walls with graffiti.
But Jasper? He got the hard jobs. The terrifying ones. The ones that gnawed at the edges of sanity.
Because his uncle — the real leader — always knew where to place the scapegoat.
Jasper walked on, the katana held out in front of him like a torch. His voice filled the cavern in stammered bursts, muttering to the stone, to the unseen things in the dark, or maybe just to himself.
"Yeah, that's right… I'm the hero. The amazing hero of humanity. First follower of the sun. Revolutionary leader." His voice cracked, and he forced a laugh, shaking his head. "Gods suck at being gods anyway."
His legs still trembled. His shoulders shook. But at least the tears had stopped.
The cavern shifted around him. The walls closed tighter, the hue brightening. White light bounced harder against the katana's glow, painting jagged shadows ahead. For a second, Jasper thought he'd broken through to another chamber.
Then he looked up. The ceiling was gone. Just endless dark, the same void above as always.
He turned his head to the right—and froze.
A wall loomed there. Thick. White. Jagged, like something massive had struck it again and again. His breath caught in his chest as his eyes adjusted, and then the shape sharpened.
Not stone.
Bone.
Rows and rows, spines twisted like towers, limbs bent at angles that didn't belong to any creature he'd ever seen. Hollow sockets stared back at him, stacked like a graveyard trying to crawl out of itself.
Three things hit him at once.
He wasn't the first one here.
These were bones — hundreds, maybe thousands.
And Evodil… Evodil had done this.
Jasper staggered forward, katana raised higher. The blade's glow rolled across the massive skeletons, catching jagged edges where they'd been cleaved, burned, shattered. He could picture it in flashes: spiders the size of buildings, serpents thick as pillars, creatures that had no reason to exist here — and Evodil tearing through them.
Not stumbling. Not hesitating. Not laughing or muttering to himself like Jasper was now.
Just cutting. Killing. Hunting.
The silence of the cavern pressed in, broken only by Jasper's uneven breath. He tried to smile, tried to scoff at the thought of his uncle. But it came out thin.
"Monster," he whispered. And for the first time, he wasn't sure if he meant it as insult… or truth.
He trudged past the endless scatter of bones. Some were split clean in half and left beside each other like butcher scraps. Others had been blasted into fine piles of ash that looked too much like autumn leaves for comfort. One—long, cylindrical, with jagged cuts across its side—looked suspiciously like a giant piece of sushi. His stomach growled. Of course it did. Roots and scraps were all he'd been eating lately, and now he was drooling at corpses. Fantastic.
Then the bones thinned, replaced once more by darkness. He almost missed them. At least bones were something. Here, the air pressed in colder, heavier. His knees wobbled under a sudden wave of fatigue, as if he'd just sprinted a mile uphill. Each inhale caught sharp in his chest. Each step felt less like walking and more like dragging himself through wet sand.
Gravity itself felt wrong. Too thick, too slow—like the world had been switched with some crueler planet. Every stride lagged, like the air didn't want him moving forward. His mind jumped, absurdly, to video games back on Earth. This was what it felt like when you clipped out of bounds, when you wandered into a zone you weren't supposed to enter yet.
And then, there it was.
He nearly tripped at the cliff's edge, boots scuffing stone. Below him, rising from the cavern floor, was a spike. A stalagmite—but nothing like the ones he'd seen before.
It wasn't massive. "Massive" was a word you used for mountains or towers, things you could measure. This was… something else. It rammed upward from floor to unseen ceiling like the earth itself had been pierced through, like some hand outside the world had hammered it down and left it behind.
It didn't look grown. Or carved.
It looked placed.
All around its base sprawled ruins—slabs of broken stone arranged in arcs that might have once been walls or a dome. Now, they were split and crawling with pale moss, fungi that pulsed faintly in the katana's glow, cracks that zigzagged in ways that made no geological sense.
Jasper gripped the hilt tighter. His chest rose and fell in quick, shallow breaths. The thing ahead of him wasn't just old. It wasn't ancient.
It was wrong.
Like it belonged to some other place, some other story, and had been dropped here by mistake.
His skin prickled. The hair on his arms stood on end. He licked his lips, trying to shake it off with a mutter.
"...Great. Exactly what I needed. A giant… whatever-the-hell this is."
But even as he spoke, his voice sounded small. The cavern didn't echo it back.
It just swallowed it.
Jasper found his way down the cliff, the same worn path carved into the rock like someone had been here before him. Probably Evodil. Maybe. Then again… maybe not. Maybe there had been someone else long before. The thought stuck like a splinter. If humans couldn't survive down here without Noah's damned cart system, then who—or what—had left the marks of passage?
He slid halfway down before nearly eating stone face-first. His boot slipped, balance vanished, and the only thing between him and a quick obituary was the katana stabbing into the rock at the last second. He clung to it, chest heaving, watching his life play out in a half-second highlight reel. Not the first time this week. Probably not the last.
"Perfect," he muttered through gritted teeth, yanking the blade free and dusting himself off. "Hero of humanity—killed by bad footing."
The dome loomed ahead. Jagged, cracked, its silhouette carved out against the faint glow spilling from unseen fissures above. Jasper didn't give it the luxury of second-guessing. If Evodil had been here, then it was either already safe—or already cleaned out in the most terrifying way possible. Either way, he decided not to think about it. Thinking too much around Evodil's leftovers never led anywhere good.
So he stepped inside.
The air changed immediately. Cooler, heavier, like the place had been holding its breath for centuries and only just let it out when he crossed the threshold. He slowed without meaning to, his boots crunching on cracked stone. The floor was uneven, pockmarked by patches of dull moss. Dust coated everything in a thick, velvety layer.
No wind. No drip of water. No distant echoes.
Nothing alive.
Tables slumped half-broken under fallen beams, their splintered legs splayed like broken bones. Chairs lay scattered, some in heaps, some twisted in shapes that didn't look like furniture anymore. Whatever this place once was, it had been abandoned long before him.
Jasper's katana hummed faintly in his hand, the glow spilling across walls covered in faint symbols. Murals, maybe. Old. Fragmented. He tilted his head as he tried to parse them: a circle cut neatly down the middle. A line of eyes, perfectly even. A shape that looked like a star if you didn't blink, or a gear if you stared too long.
Old banners hung limp above the walls, little more than pale threads. One brushed against his shoulder as he passed, and the fabric disintegrated instantly, crumbling into dust that clung to his jacket before drifting to the floor.
His steps carried him past what might've once been a desk—half-collapsed, stone top split clean through, nameplate eroded into smooth nothing. A rusted lamp leaned on its side nearby, bulb long gone. Shelves lined the far wall, most collapsed in on themselves, their contents buried beneath rubble.
He scanned it all in silence, biting down on the urge to whistle just to hear something back. But there was no echo here. No voice waiting to mock him.
No blood. No bones. No signs of battle.
Whatever ended this place hadn't come with violence.
It had just… stopped.
He dragged himself closer to one of the tables, his body already aching with exhaustion and his nerves raw enough that every shadow felt like it had teeth. Hands pressed flat against the wood, he leaned forward, bracing himself. Surprisingly, the table was sturdy—far sturdier than it had any right to be for something that looked centuries old.
His breathing slowed as he scanned the walls, eyes darting across their jagged shapes. At first, he thought the cracks were natural—just stone breaking down with time. But no. Up close, they didn't look like cracks at all. They looked… drawn. Marked. Thin, sharp lines carved with intent, like someone had dragged ink or a blade across the stone. It unsettled him more than actual damage would've.
The katana in his grip burned steady now, brighter than before. Its light wasn't flickering anymore—it was almost like it was with him, afraid of the silence just as much as he was.
He tilted his head back, staring up at the massive stalagmite in the center, and then beyond it, at the missing ceiling. Or the illusion of one. The cavern gaped open overhead, yet the inside of the dome remained untouched. Not a single stone fallen from above. Not a single dent in the furniture. Everything intact, preserved. Too clean.
His mouth went dry.
Had this place always been like this?
Or was it made to look like this?
What if it wasn't ruin at all—what if someone wanted it to seem ruined?
The thought tightened like a knot in his chest.
And then—
A sound.
The sharp, undeniable press of a footstep.
Right behind him.
He snatched the katana and vaulted onto the table, boots thudding hard enough to make the old wood groan. The grain bit into his soles. His breath was a ragged thing in his throat as he spun where he sat, eyes darting to the place behind him.
A boulder filled the space there, hulking and dull, like someone had dropped a piece of the cave down and left it to stare. Not a person. Not a threat, not real. Maybe it had always been there and a pebble had fallen. Maybe he had imagined the footstep. He ran a hand over his scalp, forced a crooked laugh, and told himself he was losing it.
"How the hell did Evodil stay sane after this place?" he muttered, letting the panic bleed out in a sound that tried to be a joke. He eased back down on the table, the relief settling into him like a warm, stupid blanket.
Then the boulder vanished.
Where it had been, a single white eye floated, wide and unblinking, fixed on him like a lamp. Jasper's laugh cut off mid-breath. The katana in his hand was gone. He looked at his free hand as if it had been stolen, then back at the eye.
And suddenly he was somewhere else. Darkness wrapped around him so tight he could taste it, cold and hollow and familiar. He knew this feeling by sight and by the hiss in his ears. It was the same place after the war had shredded everything — the same empty, echoing nothing where ghosts took shape.
He did not know why he was there. He did not know why it chose now.
The eye blinked out, and he was back on the table in the dome. Another eye opened nearby, then another. They multiplied like stars pulled out of the dark and set on him, until the air was full of unblinking things. He saw one, then two, then dozens, their white surfaces reflecting the katana's glow that was not in his hand. His stomach turned tight.
They kept coming. One hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred and thirty-two. Three hundred and thirty-two eyes fixed on him, each a cold, patient circle in the black. Then the dome swallowed them, or he blinked and could not say which, and suddenly there were none.
He had not moved. He had not leapt down, had not run, had not screamed. He had not even stood up.
He sat on the table, palms flat on the wood, chest stuttering, and stared up at the fissured ceiling as if answers might drip down from it.
Jasper's chest rose and fell in sharp jolts, lungs dragging air that felt too heavy, too old. His thoughts scrambled, clawing at the numbers, the eyes, the way they had stared—332 of them, all locked on him, all gone without reason. Did it mean something? Was this place unraveling him thread by thread, pulling apart his mind because he dared to look too closely? Had he gone too far? Was this where he died, punished for trying to understand?
Then it hit him. He never turned around. He never checked the sound, never faced the step he swore he'd heard. There was something behind him. Something with him. The hairs on the back of his neck stood sharp as needles, the silence ringing like a bell. He wasn't alone.
And yet he still breathed. Which meant whatever stood there wasn't eager to strike—not yet. Maybe it wanted to hear him out. Or maybe it wanted to play. Jasper forced himself to believe the first lie, because the second was unbearable. His fingers wrapped tight around the katana's hilt, and slowly—hesitantly—he turned.
What stared back wasn't a beast. Not a nightmare, not the eldritch thing his panic conjured.
It was worse.
The so-called dictator of Menystria. Evodil.
His black coat draped like shadow itself, horns curled back like a crown carved by something cruel. White hair faintly catching the false light. And that smirk—sharp, familiar, the same one he wore back when he was normal. Except Jasper knew. It wasn't the same man anymore. It couldn't be.
Normally, Jasper would demand answers. He'd throw words, not steel, because maybe they could still matter. But Evodil's stance said enough. The silence. The absence of jokes. This wasn't banter. This wasn't chaos. This was the end.
And Jasper realized what Noah's plan had been all along.
He wasn't sent here to win.
He was sent here to buy time—with his own life.