MASTERS OF THE ETERNITY
CHAPTER 32: The Sky That Follows
The road east was a thread of pale stone, stretching through fields scorched into shadow. The grass had long since crisped to ash, but here and there, blackened stalks still stood, brittle and sharp as splinters. The war had moved on, but the land had not forgiven it.
No birds called. No insects hummed. The only sound was the steady rhythm of the Intervener's mounts — though even that was strange. Each pale warbeast devoured distance with strides too smooth to be natural, and every time a hoof struck earth, the sound was swallowed almost instantly. As if the land itself did not want to remember they had passed.
Raian kept his gaze on the road ahead, refusing to look over his shoulder. He didn't need to. He could feel it — the sky was still watching them. It had been watching since the bridge.
Not with the sharp focus of an enemy's eyes, but with the crushing inevitability of a storm moving in from the horizon. The blink was gone now, no red spark in the clouds, but in its absence the pressure had grown heavier. The air seemed to bend inward toward them.
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Lira rode beside him, her cloak pulled tight against the cold. Her fingers twitched against her thigh, as though she wanted to summon a spell-light but thought better of it. She kept glancing upward.
"Do you hear it?" she asked quietly.
Raian's grip on the Blade tightened. "Hear what?"
Her eyes stayed on the clouds. "It's not… really a sound. More like a note you can feel. Like when you're near a great bell that's just been struck, and the air is still shaking."
The Pale Twin rode two lengths ahead. She didn't turn, but her voice carried back easily, flat and certain. "It's not a bell. That's the Fourth telling the land you're here."
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The wind shifted. The road bent slightly north. That was when Raian saw them.
Figures. Far off at first, no more than smudges on the horizon, but as the clouds thinned and the moonlight reached them, he could see their shapes. Not the Creed, not the Order — too few for an army, too scattered for a patrol. They were walking. Always walking.
And their edges… wavered. The air around them bent like heat haze, even in the cold night. Their forms seemed to stretch and pull slightly apart with each step, only to knit together again, like reflections in water disturbed by a slow ripple.
One of them lifted its head.
Even at that distance, Raian felt the Blade flinch in his hands. The second Rune dimmed to a dull ember. The third guttered like a candle caught in a draft. His breath came shallow.
"They're not it," the Intervener said without slowing. "They're its messengers. The ones it sends ahead so the ground will know how to break under you."
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The riders urged their mounts faster. The pale beasts obeyed without sound, their strides lengthening, the road unrolling beneath them like a dark ribbon.
Raian tried to keep his focus on the forward path, but his eyes kept flicking back to the horizon. The messengers were growing clearer, but not closer — not in the way that made sense.
And then came the first tilt.
It wasn't the road. It was the sky.
The stars shifted — just a fraction, but enough to set his stomach lurching. It felt as if the world had been nudged by something too vast to see. The messengers stopped mid-step, their heads turning in eerie unison toward the darkness above the riders.
The Blade spoke in his mind.
Not with the voices of the first or second Runes, and not the heated, impatient tone of the third. This was colder, older. Words like ice grinding against stone: unchained, east, buried sky.
Raian almost dropped it. His heart pounded in his ears.
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"Faster," the Intervener commanded, her voice sharper now.
They thundered forward. The messengers began to move again, but not toward them. They walked parallel, maintaining that same impossible distance, like predators shadowing prey through the trees.
Lira's head jerked back toward them. "Why aren't they closing in?"
"They don't have to," the Pale Twin said without looking. "They're measuring. For when it arrives."
Raian swallowed. "Arrives from where?"
The Pale Twin's silence was answer enough.
---
By the time the moon fully broke from the clouds, the messengers were gone. Vanished into the folds of the horizon as if they'd never been. But Raian could still feel them. He could feel them in the air — thick, resisting, as though the space they moved through had grown heavier.
They stopped only when they reached the remains of an old watchtower, burned hollow and leaning like a rotted tooth. The stone still bore scorch marks, and the air inside smelled faintly of char even after decades.
No fire was lit. The Intervener's riders dismounted in silence, setting their pale mounts to graze — though Raian noticed they pulled nothing from the ground. Their mouths moved as if chewing, but the grass beneath them remained untouched.
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They ate cold rations, if it could be called eating. Raian forced down the hard bread from his pack, the taste like sawdust. Izek sat apart, sharpening his axe with slow, deliberate strokes, never looking up at the sky.
No one spoke. It felt as if speech itself might draw something closer.
Somewhere beyond the treeline, the wind rose. Leaves and blackened stalks rattled.
And beneath the sound of the wind came that low, bell-like vibration. Closer now.
Raian froze. It wasn't in his ears anymore. The sound was inside his body.
It was in his ribs, his lungs, his heart — a steady hum that matched his pulse until it began to change it. His heartbeat slowed, not naturally, but in jolts, as if something unseen was deciding the rhythm for him.
He looked at Lira. Her face was pale, her lips parted, eyes wide.
"You feel it too?" he mouthed.
She nodded.
---
The Intervener finally spoke. Her voice was almost gentle, but there was no comfort in it. "Sleep lightly tonight. The messengers may return. Or the Fourth may send its shadow first. Either way, dawn will not be far enough away."
Raian lay back against the cold stone, the Blade resting across his chest. The hum in his ribs never faded. It followed him into half-sleep, thrumming like a hand pressed against a drum.
And in that not-quite-dream, he thought he saw the sky tilt again — and something vast begin to crawl through it.
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TO BE CONTINUED...