[POV Third-Person Omniscient] [Tense: Present]
07:55 p.m. - At Deep In Abyss, Dungeon, Frosthaven, Aurelthorn (16 September 2025)
In the pit beneath Frosthaven, meat still knits on shattered bone, but the soul that once answers to the name Ryan Mercer is already gone. Flesh remembers the command SAFE FROM WOUNDS and obeys, rebuilding only to be stripped again by the Abyss, an empty machine looping without a pilot.
---
08:00 p.m. - At Forest Verge from north-west, Frosthaven, Aurelthorn (16 September 2025)
The Red Moon sits swollen above Frosthaven, a rust‑red eye bleeding light over rooftops and river. Under its glare, colors drain out of the world. Shadows gain teeth.
On the low ridge beyond the northern woods, black banners do not flap, they hang as if the air itself kneels.
Sovereign Lord Malakar stands at the crest, cloak pooling around his boots like spilled night. The spider and crescent sigil at his breast catches the Red Moon's glare, a thread of silver drowned in crimson.
Below him, ranks assemble in quiet patterns:
Demons with charcoal skin and ember eyes roll their shoulders, chains and blades whispering.
Vampires straighten velvet and mail, faces pale as bone, irises lit with the same red as the sky.
Dark fae drift between them, smiles thin, hands never far from curved knives that drink starlight.
Malakar raises one hand, long fingers opening.
"Children of Belmara."
The words carry without shout, sliding through the trees and over the frost‑stiff grass, brushing every ear with silk and iron.
"Behold this kingdom of men. It cracks. It bleeds. Its shepherds gnaw their own flocks for coin and pride."
A murmur answers from thousands of throats, more vibration than sound.
Morrigan Nightshade steps forward from the vampire phalanx, red eyes bright as the Blood Eye above. Her cloak hisses over the dead leaves.
"Their banners sag," she calls, chin high. "Their knights die in distant fields. Frosthaven stands alone on this road like a lamb at the gate."
Her lips curve, sharp as a dagger point.
"Grant the word, my lord, and we cut through their walls to Dawnspire itself."
Malakar's gaze drifts over Frosthaven's distant walls, the tiny pinpricks of lanterns. His expression does not change.
"Tonight we test their spine," he answers. "Let the Blood Eye drink fear, and the world shall know the name Belmara."
Steel rings as demons lower spearpoints. Vampires bare fangs that gleam wet in the red.
---
08:05 p.m. - At Battlements from north-west, Frosthaven, Aurelthorn (16 September 2025)
On Frosthaven's north‑western wall, a lone sentry squints into the treeline.
The forest should be black.
Instead, something darker than wood and shadow moves there. A line too straight. Too smooth.
His throat goes dry. Every fine hair on his arms lifts under the Red Moon's cold touch.
"Gods above…"
His hand slams down on the iron lever.
The great bell over the gate lurches into motion.
Its first note booms out, thick and heavy, rolling over roofs and alleys.
A second follows. Then a third.
"TO ARMS!"
The cry rips from the sentry's chest, voice cracking.
"DEAD FROM THE NORTH! TO ARMS!"
Boots pound on stone as other guards spill from the tower doors, half‑buckled cuirasses clattering, helms under their arms.
One armored officer catches the sentry's sleeve.
"What in all hells—"
"LOOK!"
The officer follows his shaking finger.
Eyes widen. Color drains.
"SUMMON THE CHIEF PRIEST! RUN!"
He shoves a younger guard toward the stair.
"AND THE MAGE! FIND AEMOND! MOVE!"
---
08:10 p.m. - At The Temple, Frosthaven, Aurelthorn (16 September 2025)
Incense curls in the Sanctum Immaculate, soft gold against carved stone. The chief priest traces a stag in the air with two fingers, lips moving in low prayer.
The doors slam open.
A boy in guard livery staggers in, chest heaving.
"Father— the north wall— undead— an army—"
The priest's hand stills mid‑gesture. He closes his eyes for a heartbeat, then reaches for a heavy medallion of the Staglord and a battered leather satchel bulging with scrolls.
"We walk to the wall," he answers, voice steady. "The light does not flee from shadow."
He sweeps past the boy, incense eddies breaking around his robes.
---
08:30 p.m. - At Mage Tower, Frosthaven, Aurelthorn (16 September 2025)
In a tower wrapped with sigils and caged ravens, Aemond sits cross‑legged before a flickering brazier, eyes shut. Symbols drift above the coals, lines of fire and frost woven in slow rotation.
A fist hammers the oak door.
"Master Aemond!"
He opens his eyes.
Heat from the brazier dies an inch, as if the Red Moon outside siphons it. The shout on the other side carries raw fear.
"Belmara, master! The bell— they say the dead come from the woods!"
Aemond rises in one smooth motion, staff already in his hand. Azure eyes flash once toward the narrow window, where the sky burns red.
"It seems," he murmurs, "the shadow has indeed despaired of peace."
He strikes the staff butt against the stone.
Arcane lines around the brazier flare, then stream into the crystal at its tip, filling it with sharp blue light.
"Wake the apprentices. Light every brazier on the wall. Tell the captain I weave a ward over the north."
The door bangs open. A wide‑eyed apprentice nearly trips over her own robe, then bolts at his words.
---
09:00 p.m. - At Battlements from north-west, Frosthaven, Aurelthorn (16 September 2025)
Back on the battlements, soldiers pack into place, shields locking, spears bristling over the parapet.
"GET THOSE BRAZIERS LIT!" a sergeant roars, face lined, jaw set.
"ARCHERS, NOTCH! ANYTHING THAT CROSSES THAT FIELD, YOU PUT IT DOWN!"
Pitch‑filled iron baskets flare to life one by one, orange tongues clawing at the red‑washed dark.
Beyond the halo of firelight, Malakar's host halts at the treeline, a wall of eyes and steel and waiting teeth.
For a breath, the night holds.
---
[POV Seraphina Third-Person] [Tense: Past]
07:00 p.m. - At Outskirts, Road to Dawnspire, Aurelthorn. (16 September 2025)
The frayed edge of her travel‑worn cloak skimmed the wet ground with each stride. To anyone passing, she had looked like nothing more than another sword for hire, some F‑rank adventurer plodding along the trade road toward the distant glow of the capital. Yet beneath the rough, unremarkable wool, Seraphina Duskbloom had been a compressed blade of killing purpose.
A thin, cutting chill rode the air, the sort that whispered of frost not far off. It was a known bite, echoing nights spent in the Eryndral nightmare. She tugged the hood further down not against the temperature, but to smother the blaze of her hair and the calculating glint in her crimson eyes. All her senses were keyed to the dark: the far owl‑call, the faint scurry of some small animal in the brush, the distant groan of a wagon along the main road. She traveled with a hunter's noiseless exactness, a soldier's instincts refusing to dull just because she wore a disguise.
An adventurer. The irony had not been lost on her. The Empire's Radiant General, reduced to scraping for coppers on a guild board. She'd taken the first quest that had pointed south‑west. "Escort merchant caravan to Dawnspire." It had been boring, beneath her, but it had been perfect cover. No one looked twice at the hired muscle.
Her thoughts had drifted to the boy, Ryan. Commoner. The title had fallen from her lips so easily, a reflex of her station. Yet he hadn't bristled. He'd chuckled. He had been an enigma clumsy, talkative, yet with a strange, unshakable confidence. He had seen beauty where she had seen battlefields.
A part of her, a part she ruthlessly suppressed, had found his naive optimism... refreshing. But it had been a distraction. A liability. He had been back in Frosthaven, playing merchant, while she walked into the lion's den.
The air had that early‑frost bite, a thin cold that had reminded her of the bad experience in Eryndral Village. It had been a nightmare that had haunted her. She tasted iron on the wind.
Her thumb brushed the hidden hilt sewn into her cloak's lining.
Lyscia's face had cut through the dark ink‑stained fingers, that irritating half‑smirk.
Captured.
The word still clawed.
She'd heard it that morning in the Adventurer guild taproom, slipping between a pair of Aurelthorn soldiers drunk on cheap ale.
"Braided witch from Drakensvale. Took her at Eryndral. General's pup. Shackled and sent south‑west to Dawnspire," one had bragged, thumping his mug.
"King Aldric'd wring her for every war secret she had," the other had slurred. "Then hang her pretty little head over the gate."
Seraphina hadn't moved. Just listened, cloak hood low, mersha had lain cold in her memory. Lyscia had been all that had remained of that crooked, quarrelsome little circle they'd called family.
Rival, yes. But Mersha's other sister.
(If I left you to rot, she would die twice.)
The road began toward Dawnspire.
Seraphina's lips curled into a faint, grim smile.
She allowed them their walls and their banners. Walls could be scaled. Banners could be burned.
Her fingers curled around Soulblaze, heart steady, not racing. That had unsettled her more than any horror.
She took a final, steadying breath of the chill night air.
The real mission began.
---
[POV Ryan First-Person] [Tense: Present]
05:00 a.m. – At Deep in the Abyss, Frosthaven, Aurelthorn (17 September 2025)
Everything is wrong and still.
No drip of water. No whisper of air. No echo.
Just a shaft of stone that eats light and a body lying where the dark is thickest.
The gnawing is gone.
The grinding, skin-peeling, bone-splintering carousel of pain is gone.
Just black.
---
The first change is a smell that isn't a smell. Heavy. Oily. Like burned metal and rotten sea.
Something seeps from the cracks above. At first, it's a trickle. Then a line. Then a hundred thin black tongues sliding out of the stone, all at once.
They pour.
They pour and pour until the Abyss becomes a rising well of thick, cold liquid, swallowing rock ledges, swallowing the place where my body lies. It lifts the corpse like trash in floodwater.
I don't know that yet.
Weight comes back as pressure on my skin. My skin comes back with it.
Cold clamps around my fingers, my ankles, my throat. The black stuff holds me up like a hand under my back, pushing me toward a circle of lighter dark far above back toward the place where Gin's hand hit my shoulders and turned "equal shares" into a punchline.
The level climbs. The shaft narrows. The surface of the liquid brushes the point where I remember empty space and panic.
The exact spot my boots left solid ground.
We reach it.
For a heartbeat, my body floats there, face up, eyes closed, like some cheap horror prop at max height. Then the flow reverses. The liquid sucks backward into the cracks, dragging its own stain with it. The level drops faster than it rose.
It leaves me behind.
Black recedes down the stone throat until it is only a smear on rough rock, then a wet shine, then nothing. The pit is dry again. Silent again.
Only I don't care it anymore.
My lungs pull in a breath on their own.
It tears like swallowing glass.
Air scours my throat. My chest jerks. A sound that isn't quite a word rasps out.
"...kh…"
My fingers twitch.
Awareness slams back in one ugly piece.
The fall. The endless breaking. The Abyss licking me apart, cell by cell, while Safe from Wounds forced my body to regrow like some cursed looping forever.
I remember every moment.
Not like a normal memory more like in a garbage roller crush on me.
I don't feel it. Not like before.
The memory sits there in my head, sharp and clear, but it doesn't pain anymore.
A breath hisses between my teeth.
Then—
"Heh."
The sound crawls out of my chest, ugly and raw. Something behind my teeth stretches. The corners of my mouth pull wide, wider, until my face hurts more than my ribs ever did.
It doesn't feel like laughter. It feels like a knife twisting free.
"HEHEHEHE—"
The noise rips out of me, bouncing off the stone walls, tumbling back down thinner and higher, like some other lunatic is laughing with me from deeper in the shaft.
I choke on it. Cough once. Twice.
Then laugh harder.
My muscles shake. My stomach cramps. My throat burns.
I don't stop.
When I finally run out of air, I lie there on the ledge—spread out on rough stone, clothes soaked and clinging, hair pasted to my forehead—and suck in a slow, broken breath.
"I'M BACK."
My voice scrapes.
"I'M FUCKING BACK."
The words echo softer than the laugh, but they stick. They sink into the stone like nails.
I stare up.
No torch up there now. No warm orange. Just a faint grey suggestion where the shaft widens into the main tunnel.
Gin. Barden. Lyss.
Gone.
Of course.
(I don't know how long I lie there.)
(I don't care.)
I push one hand flat on the rock. Feel for broken bones.
Nothing.
Whole ribs. Whole spine. Whole skull. No missing teeth. No holes. My clothes are torn, but there's skin under every rip.
Safe from Wounds still does its job. Good little script.
I flex my fingers, watching knuckles rise and sink.
"I died."
I say it out loud. Because saying it makes it real. Makes it mine.
"I died. I stayed dead. Long enough that there wasn't even a me to scream."
The thought should terrify me.
It doesn't.
Fear is a dead.
I remember sitting at the desk in the Mystery House, mouse under my hand, cursor hovering over SUBMIT. Rage spilling out of me in big, ugly blocks while the black hole pulsed in the window.
Safe from Nightmares of the Abyss. Safe from The Red Moon. Greed, left naked.
At some point, my finger must have twitched.
Click. Click.
Smile like a villain.
Then bed.
Then—
This.
So the cheat power finally pushed live.
The Abyss read the new rules and spat me out like bad food.
"Good," I whisper.
My voice sounds different. Lower. Flatter. Like someone scraped off the last layer of larynx.
I roll onto my side and sit up, slow and careful. The ledge ends just beyond my boots, the drop waits there, a darkness that still feels full, even if it isn't chewing on me now.
I stare down into it.
Nothing stares back.
"You had your fun."
The words are for the pit. For the thing behind it. For the world.
"For a while there, I thought that was it. That the joke was on me." A breath. "Nerd falls into fantasy dungeon, gets turned into infinite pain battery, end credits."
My fingers curl over the lip of the stone. Nails scrape grit.
"But then I remembered who holds the pen."
I touch my chest with two fingers.
"Me."
"Isn't that funny?"
My laugh this time is small, just a breath through my teeth. It tastes like copper.
"I liked walking behind you. Watching you work. Thinking, yeah, this is fine, this is safe, this is how adventurers do it."
I drag my wet sleeve across my face. Push hair back. Blink grit away.
"That was my delusion." My voice drops. "I forgot that I'm currently in the Middle Ages."
I stand.
My legs wobble for half a second, then steady. No dizziness. No weakness. I should be wrecked.
I'm not.
My body feels like someone did overnight maintenance on the system.
I look down again, into the hole that ate me.
"You're done," I tell it. "You don't know what I can do. At least what I can do isn't just carrying a bag."
"THANK YOU," I bark into the dark. "YOU GAVE ME SOMETHING USEFUL."
My shout comes back shredded.
I grin.
"My turn now."
---
I step away from the ledge, toward the faint grey mouth of the upper tunnel. Water squelches in my boots. My clothes slap wet against my skin. Each footfall sends a small shiver up my spine.
I've played through dungeons in games where monsters just respawn, but down here, things stay dead for good, no do-overs.
Except me.
No static in the back of my skull anymore.
Just me.
"Stay hungry," I whisper. "I'll send you better food next time."
The darkness says nothing.
For once, I like the silence.