I thought I had reached the bottom of the world when I touched the bed of the Styx, but the desert of bones was only a veil, an antechamber before the true horror.
As I followed the magnetic pull that made my obsidian ribcage vibrate, the ground beneath my feet began to tilt. The ivory sand became sparser, giving way to shiny black rock, polished by an eternity of desolation. Suddenly, the horizon disappeared.
I stopped at the edge of a perfectly geometric break. Before me lay a pit so vast that it seemed to have been dug by the fall of a god. Tartarus.
It was not simply a hole in the ground; it was a wound in reality. The walls of the pit were not made of stone, but of layers of compressed darkness, so dense that they absorbed the slightest glimmer of light. A cold wind, laden with a thousand years of bitterness, rose from the depths, bringing with it sounds that should never have crossed the threshold of silence: the creaking of eternal chains and the murmurings of imprisoned Titans.
The call I felt then became a silent scream.
What lay at the bottom did not ask for my presence, it demanded it. It was a brute force, a presence so ancient that it made Charon seem like a child. The fragment of Chronos, or whatever served as its vessel, glowed at the bottom, a solitary golden point in this ocean of absolute darkness.
I felt my new stone skin crack slightly under the atmospheric pressure emanating from the pit. Every instinct for self-preservation I had retained from my human life screamed at me to back away, to return to the shore, to let myself dissolve into oblivion rather than descend into it. Tartarus was a place from which no one returned, even the dead.
But I was no longer a man. I was an anomaly, a living crime forged in the mercury of the Styx.
"You seek what has been broken," whispered the multiple voice again, closer this time. "But to gather the shards of time, you must first accept that yours is over."
I did not answer. My obsidian fingers dug into the rock at the edge of the precipice. I had no rope, no path, only my will and this attraction burning in my chest like a fire.
I stared at the golden point at the bottom of the pit. It seemed to pulsate, expanding and then contracting. With each pulse, a flash of memory struck me: a hand holding a lycoris, the sound of an hourglass breaking, a throne of blood. Memories that were not mine, or perhaps memories of a future I was destined to build.
Without a glance at the world above, I began my descent. I was not descending to my punishment. I was descending to my throne.
Tartarus awaited me, and for the first time, the abyss would discover that it was not the darkest thing in this place.