The world outside the city wall was a failure. It hung still, thick with a fine dust that tasted of burnt ozone. They had blasted out of the Lower Rail Terminus door—a heavy, slamming finality—and now stood on ground that was unstable, patched with dead, gray scrub. This was the Foldlands.
Torvin gave no time for reaction.
"Move," he muttered, voice rough. "Low. Fast. Stay off the ridge. Everything out here has height advantage."
Lysa followed, legs heavy. The Gutter-Beast residue, sticky on her tunic, was a hot, reeking embarrassment, but it was their only shield. The Foldlands stretched out, a brown and violet waste under a perpetual, sickly haze from the decaying Aether-Rift. It was a place of chemical corrosion and dimensional bleed. The terrain was less rock and more hardened, corrupted viscera of a dead landscape.
Torvin's rules were simple and absolute, delivered in short, functional bursts over the next mile:
1. Be silent. Every sound was a mistake. They moved in staggered steps, avoiding the crunch of crystalline dust, placing their weight on the tougher, black veins of basalt beneath the soil.
2. Ignore the light. The dim, shifting glow from the distant Rift-Nests was bait. "It draws the stupid ones," Torvin hissed. "The intelligent ones track what the light attracts."
3. Keep the magic locked. "Your power," he said once, glancing back with cold severity, "is a dinner bell. You use it, we stop running. We start fighting something too big to kill."
Lysa tried to suppress everything—hunger, the memory of the Void-Ghoul, the fear of Anya's pursuit. She forced her mind blank, a dead sheet of iron. It failed immediately.
The silence here was not quiet. It was a vibrating, high-frequency hum—the static of the world being simultaneously created and destroyed. Every unstable particle of Aether, every pinprick dimensional tear, broadcast its existence directly into her skull. It was raw input, overwhelming her senses.
The voice of the Dark Weaver was louder here, intimate, pressed against her thoughts, using the static as its medium.
You are empty. This flight is pathetic. The power is endless. Simply reach out. Take. Take the energy of the world and make your own quiet.
Lysa felt a sharp, internal dizziness. She braced herself, hand scraping against a pillar of warped, petrified wood. "I can't. The noise is too much."
Torvin didn't slow. He grabbed her collar and hauled her forward. "It is static. It's the air you breathe here. You learn to filter it, or you drown. Now."
He forced their pace, driving them into a jagged ravine—a natural trench carved by ancient water flow that offered deep cover from the haze and the distant surveillance drones.
They moved for nearly three hours through the ravine, the pressure of the environment building. The only communication was the scrape of their boots, the hard presence of Torvin's breathing. Lysa focused entirely on the cold, dull, metal pressure of the Witch-Iron in her pocket. It was the only thing that kept the Weaver's voice from overriding her own thoughts entirely.
Torvin stopped. It was an instant, total physical halt. His hand slammed against the rock face, and his breath hitched—not in fatigue, but in controlled cessation.
"Scent," he rasped, his eyes narrow slits. "Clean. Metallic. Ozone and something else. Something calculated."
Lysa registered nothing but the internal noise. Torvin's senses were based on reality, sharpened by years of exposure: the smell of heavily processed leather, faint electrical ozone, and a thin, chemical ghost of an Aether-Net Tracer solution baked into the soil.
"Wardens?" Lysa whispered, fear seizing her throat.
"No. Not soft enough." Torvin spoke the words with cold, bitter certainty. "They are creatures of logic. They hunt the hunters. Wraith-Stalkers." He spit dust onto the ground. "They know how I move. They know what I mask."
He pulled Lysa deep under a rocky overhang, the shadows absolute. "Scent is old—maybe an hour. But they back-check every shadow. They are not animals. They think in patterns."
He slid the Rift-Slicer from its sheath. The black, rune-etched metal caught the hazy light. He then pulled the Witch-Iron from his belt and jammed it into her palm.
"Hold this. It slows the flux," he ordered, his eyes boring into hers. "You twitch, they see the heat ripple. You freeze. You break the concentration, we die."
Lysa gripped the cold metal. The psychic noise dropped instantly. The Weaver's whisper became a distant, muffled echo, muffled by the presence of the inert metal. Torvin moved back onto the path, his massive body sinking into a patient, aching stillness. He was waiting for the perfect moment of tactical vulnerability.
The wait stretched into agonizing minutes. Lysa could feel the heat radiating off Torvin's tense muscles. She dared not breathe deeply. The only sound was the incessant, internal high-frequency static.
The first sign of the Stalker was the lack of static. A section of the noise simply disappeared, as if a volume switch had been thrown on that specific quadrant of the ravine.
A dark shadow detached itself from the rocks fifty feet away.
The Wraith-Stalker was pure, fast efficiency. Tall, gaunt, covered in chitin that mirrored the rock. Its head was a smooth, metallic dome with two pulsed lenses, and It held a long, segmented blade—pure Rift-Metal—that hummed with contained Aetheric power.
It did not rush. It moved with slow, calculating logic, its sensors methodically sweeping the ravine floor, looking for the tell-tale heat bloom of trapped prey.
Torvin attacked first, before the Stalker could lock its assessment, launching upward to crash against the rock, disrupting the Stalker's rhythm
The Stalker reacted instantly. Its Rift-Metal blade extended, a blur of shadow. Torvin's Slicer met it with a deafening crack.
The sound of steel against Rift-Metal was a high-pitched, painful shriek. The Stalker's blade discharged a wave of blinding, violet Aether energy. Torvin's armor runes glowed briefly, bleeding off the magic, but the impact sent him staggering back into the rock wall. His left arm dropped, the limb hanging uselessly, dislocated at the shoulder.
The Stalker registered the damage. Its lenses focused, detecting the sudden spike in thermal distress. It pursued Torvin relentlessly, using its long, terrifying stride.
Lysa watched, immobilized in the shadows. The Weaver screamed in her mind, offering the seductive promise of instant safety. He is broken. You are not. Unmake it. Now.
She squeezed the Witch-Iron, the metal cutting into her palm. She focused on the cold, hard scent of the raw meat on her back, the physical, non-magical reality of her situation. She refused the temptation.
The Stalker, now confident, committed to a powerful, overhead strike near a pile of loose, shattered rock.
Torvin dropped low, avoiding the strike by inches. The Stalker's momentum carried it slightly past him, exposing its back leg. Torvin's Slicer moved. Not a killing blow, but a necessary one: for the Achilles tendon behind its knee joint. A low, dirty, precise cut designed to destabilize.
The Stalker shrieked—a high, mechanical scream of pure rage—as its leg instantly buckled. The Rift-Metal blade clattered uselessly onto the ground.
Torvin delivered the final blow with exhausted, clinical speed. Two deep, controlled thrusts into the compromised joint, targeting the dense, crystalline energy core housed beneath the chitin. The Stalker went instantly limp, its lenses flickering and dying.
Lysa realized she had been holding her breath since Torvin's arm gave way. The air, when it finally hit her lungs, was a mix of grit, ozone, and the coppery smell of blood. She was shaking, a deep, full-body tremor of delayed shock.
Torvin stood over the carcass, leaning heavily on the rock, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. His left arm was a dead weight.
He walked straight to Lysa, his eyes cold and devoid of satisfaction. "You froze," he stated, his voice sharp with exhaustion.
She lifted her chin. She showed him the Witch-Iron, now slick with the sweat of her panic. "I held the bell."
He took the metal, giving a curt, painful nod. "Good. The Weaver is a liar."
He ignored his useless arm. He pulled out a bone-saw and worked quickly on the carcass, carving away a section of the beast's stomach lining, thick with stabilizing chem-sludge. He smeared the reeking material over Lysa's shoulders, ensuring the raw meat on her back remained perfectly coated.
"That," Torvin said, his voice quiet, "is a true cloak. It just saved your life." He winced, then used his good arm to point toward a distant, hazy mountain range. "The Ghost Peaks. We're going there. Now move. If we stop, they'll find us. And if you lose focus, they will bury us both."