The sinkhole yawned before them, a jagged maw in the flesh of the world. The caravan clustered at its edge, a hive of murmuring uncertainty. Below, the slanting afternoon sun cut through the dust-choked air, illuminating the carved lintel and the stark, impossible glyphs.
Caecilius, the merchant, squinted into the depths, his shrewd face calculating risk and reward. "A ruin. Old. Could be loot. Could be death. Could be nothing but empty halls and bad air."
Lysias, the guard captain, shook his head. "Our contract is to Al'Rahim, not tomb-raiding. The schedule is tight. We go around."
But Kaelen stood frozen, his eyes locked on the glyphs. The silver tracery in his veins, usually a faint sheen, began to thrum with a low, resonant ache, as if tuning itself to a distant frequency. Nul'Thaum. The words were not just read; they were felt, a cold pressure against his mind. He didn't need to open the Godclimb to know its pages would be screaming.
"We should at least scout it," Kaelen heard himself say, his voice sounding distant. "A source of water, perhaps. Shelter from the next sunstorm. If it's a tomb, it's marked. I… I recognize the script. It's a warning, or a name."
All eyes turned to him. Lysias's gaze was sharp. "You read that? What does it say?"
Kaelen chose his lie with care. "It's an old frontier script. It says… 'The Unforged Well.' It suggests a place of primal elements, untamed." The half-truth tasted like ash, but it served.
Intrigue won over caution. With ropes and lanterns, a small party descended: Lysias, two other guards, Caecilius, and Kaelen. The air grew cool and still, the raging heat of the desert replaced by a profound, swallowing silence. Their boots crunched on not sand, but a floor of smooth, fitted stone, half-buried by ages of dust.
They stood in a vast antechamber. The walls, where they weren't shrouded in drifts, were covered in intricate, spiraling reliefs depicting a city of impossible, non-Euclidean geometry beneath a starless sky. In the center of the chamber lay a dry, circular basin that might once have been a pool or a focus for something else.
But it was the far wall that held them rapt. Beyond the carved archway, the ruins continued into darkness. And flanking that arch were two colossal, crumbling statues. They depicted the same figure: a man in regal, ancient Aethelian armor, but crowned with coral and draped in stylized waves. His stone eyes seemed to hold a depth that swallowed the lamplight. In one hand, he held a broken sword; in the other, an orb that swirled with carved, chaotic lines.
"By the Titans…" breathed one of the guards, making the sign of the horns over his heart.
Caecilius stepped closer, his merchant's avarice warring with superstitious dread. "That armor… it's pre-Republic. Archaic. This place isn't just old. It's first dynasty."
That night, camped a safe distance from the sinkhole, Kaelen could wait no longer. Secluded in his bedroll, he opened the Godclimb. The murmurs that assaulted his mind were different here—deeper, wetter, like the groaning of a great submerged ship. The pages, guided by the proximity to Nul'Thaum, seemed to turn themselves, the rust-colored ink glowing faintly.
He found it not in the lexicon, but in a fragmented history titled "Of Those Who Sank and Yet Rule."
"Before the Seven Pillars walked, the world was a song of unformed potential—Thalas. Their Keth was the silencing of the chord, the separation of the notes into rigid law. But some melodies were too strong to be forgotten."
The text described a mighty king of the primordial Aethelian isles, a mortal of terrifying will named Theron, the Last Tide-Master. He saw the Titans not as gods, but as tyrants imposing a prison of order. In his defiance, he sought a power to match theirs. He did not break a single Law; he attempted to drown the very concept in the primal, chaotic essence of the element he commanded: the sea.
"He called upon the Deep, not as a servant, but as a partner. Three times he let the Void-sea claim him, and three times he tore himself back to shore, each time less a man and more a principle. He did not die. He… persisted. His kingdom sank, not into water, but into the memory of the unformed world. He became a sovereign of a drowned realm, a law unto himself in the chaos—The Drowned King, no longer Theron, but a new Pillar of that which was before Law. A vassal of the true Primordial, Kha'rothan, the God of Darkness. Where the Titans build, He unravels. Where They decree, He… suggests."
Kaelen's blood went cold. A mortal who had ascended not just through the Steps of Defiance, but beyond them, becoming an entity adjacent to the Titans themselves. A heretic god. A subject of Kha'rothan.
The text then addressed the glyphs, the nature of Nul'Thaum:
"Places where the Drowned King's influence breaches the Veil are marked as Nul'Thaum—'The Void's Element.' Here, the elements remember their first, wild loyalty. Fire may freeze. Stone may weep. Gravity is a whim. These are cracks in the Titan's dam, where the ocean of unmaking presses close. To wield Ulos here is to dip your cup directly into that ocean. The power is profound, but it is not yours. It is His. And He always knows when something drinks from His sea."
Kaelen slammed the book shut, the psychic echo of the words throbbing in his skull. He looked over at the dark, silent maw of the sinkhole. It wasn't just a ruin. It was a temple to a different kind of order—the chaotic, drowning order of the Drowned King. It was a place where the power he sought flowed freely, lethally, and with a consciousness attached to it.
Lysias approached, following his gaze. "Bad feeling, traveler?"
Kaelen looked at the guard captain, the normalcy of his concern a stark contrast to the cosmic truth screaming in his mind. "The deepest waters," Kaelen said quietly, repeating an old sailor's proverb he'd learned as a legionary, "hold the darkest shadows."
Lysias grunted, taking it as simple superstition. "We leave at first light. This place… it's not for the living."
As the guard walked away, Kaelen stared into the night, feeling the cool, magnetic pull of the abyss below. He now had a name for the deeper current tugging at his soul: The Drowned King. And he knew, with a certainty that filled him with both terror and a horrifying sense of destiny, that the path of true defiance would lead him into that drowned god's gaze.