The map from the Librarian was less a route and more of a suggestion whispered across a landscape that actively defied cartography. The Shattered Plains earned their name. The ground was a jagged puzzle of floating earth-motes, deep chasms humming with distorted gravity, and rivers that flowed upside-down in the air. Reality here hadn't just broken; it had forgotten how to put itself back together.
Their progress was a slow, grueling dance with physics. Kaelen's Sweeper instincts were their primary guide, her body reading the subtle shifts in the air, the telltale shimmer of a unstable spatial fold. Leo supplemented this with a new, delicate application of his talent. He couldn't use brute force here; a hundredfold application of anything might shatter the precarious balance of the entire zone.
Instead, he used a sustained, low-level multiplication of his own proprioception—his sense of self in space.
[Skill Recognized: Spatial Awareness - Basic Lv. 3]
[Sustained Application. Multiplier: x5.]
It turned the chaotic landscape into a complex but navigable web of tension points and safe pathways. He could feel which floating rock would hold their weight and which would crumble into dust. He could sense the invisible edges of gravity wells. It was mentally exhausting, a constant, fine-tuned strain, but it kept them alive.
They were three days into the plains when they found the first sign that they were not the first to attempt this path.
It was a campsite, or what was left of one. A tattered, pre-Gloaming tent was staked to the top of a large, stable earth-mote. Scattered around it were empty ration tins and—most notably—the broken components of sophisticated scanning equipment. It wasn't Sweeper issue. It was older, of a higher quality, bearing logos of corporations long dead.
"Researchers," Kaelen murmured, picking up a shattered lens. "From just after the fall, by the look of it. They were trying to study the Cradle."
Leo's enhanced spatial sense prickled. He focused it inward, on the skill of Investigation.
[Skill Recognized: Investigative Analysis - Basic Lv. 2]
[Sustained Application. Multiplier: x10.]
His perception sharpened. He saw the faint scuff marks, the pattern in the dust. He pieced together the story in moments.
"Two of them," he said, his voice distant as he processed the data. "They were here for a week. Their equipment kept failing. The local reality fluctuations fried the electronics." He pointed to a dark stain near the edge of the mote. "One of them… fell. Or was pulled. The other one left in a hurry." He walked to the edge and looked down into the swirling, color-drained mist of the chasm below. "They were heading in the same direction we are."
The discovery was a cold stone in Leo's gut. They were following a trail of failures. The best and brightest of the old world had already tried and been found wanting. What hope did they have?
They pressed on, the landscape growing more unstable with every mile. The air itself began to play tricks on them. They heard phantom voices calling their names, saw shimmering mirages of verdant, pre-Gloaming landscapes that vanished when approached. The very fabric of time seemed to be thinning.
On the fifth day, they encountered the researcher.
He was sitting with his back against a spire of crystalline rock, his body preserved by the strange energies of the plains. He wasn't a skeleton, but a desiccated husk, still clad in the tattered remains of a environmental suit. In his lap was a journal, its pages protected by a clear, flexible casing.
Kaelen covered Leo as he approached, her Schrodinger rifle scanning the area for threats. But the only threat here was the pervasive, soul-crushing strangeness.
Leo gently pried the journal from the man's grip. The last entry was scrawled in a frantic, deteriorating hand.
Day 47. Elias is gone. The thing that looked like his mother pulled him into the fissure. The instruments are useless. The Cradle's signal is not a sound, it's a thought. A wrong thought that eats other thoughts. I can feel it in my head, unspooling my memories, turning them against me.
Dr. Thorne was a fool. You can't talk to this. It doesn't have a mind. It's the absence of mind. It's a cognitive vacuum. It doesn't want to understand us. It just is, and its existence negates our own. The Empathy Engine is a fantasy. A children's story told at the end of the world.
The silence is better. The Warden's scar is a mercy. Let the Stillness take it all. It's the only—
The writing stopped mid-sentence.
Leo closed the journal, his hands trembling. The researcher's final, desperate conclusion was the antithesis of everything Dr. Thorne had believed. He hadn't found a consciousness to empathize with; he had found a void that consumed meaning itself.
Kaelen read the entry over his shoulder. "He could be right," she said quietly. "This could all be for nothing."
Leo looked from the dead man's grim testament to the churning, unnatural horizon where the Cradle waited. The researcher's despair was a potent poison, and the part of him that was still a frightened data clerk wanted to believe it. It was easier to accept oblivion than to hope for a miracle.
But then he thought of the white room. Of Valerius's cold eyes. Of the Warden's eternal vigil. They were all, in their own ways, giving up. Valerius by trying to control the end, the Warden by accepting a slow death.
Dr. Thorne's way was the only one that refused to surrender. It was the hardest path, requiring a faith that bordered on madness.
"He could be right," Leo admitted, his voice barely a whisper. He stood up, slipping the journal into his pack. It was a warning, a record of failure. But he would not let it be a prophecy. "But we won't know unless we see for ourselves."
He turned his back on the dead researcher and continued the trek, the ghost of the man's despair clinging to him like a shroud. The Shattered Plains were not just a physical trial; they were a gauntlet of lost hope, designed to break the spirit long before the body failed.
And with every step, the low, constant pressure of the Cradle's "wrong thought" grew stronger in his mind, a silent, static hum that promised only madness.