The leap into the void was not the chaos they had expected. For Jormund, the fall was a conversation with the stone. As he fell into the total darkness of Lower Tartarus, he did not feel the air whistling against his obsidian skin; he felt the mass of the mountains above him and the magnetic pull of the world's core below.
Siegfried, at his side, descended like a rusted iron angel. His tattered cape flapped in the air like broken wings.
"Straighten up!" Jormund growled. His stone voice echoed off the invisible walls of the pit.
Jormund reached out his arm. He did not search for a handhold; he commanded the rock of the wall to manifest itself. Under the impulse of his will, basalt spikes suddenly sprang from the smooth wall to provide support. With a crash of demolition, Jormund slowed their fall by plowing the wall with his mineral claws, creating a trail of sparks two hundred meters long.
They finally stabilized on a natural ledge, a tongue of rock overlooking absolute nothingness. Here, the air was so dense you could have carved it.
"Why stop?" asked Siegfried, pulling his broken sword from the rubble. "The Fragment is right there, I can feel its golden heat."
"The Fragment isn't waiting for us alone," replied Jormund.
The Anomaly stared into the darkness. His eyes, two slits of telluric light, pierced the ethereal veil. At the bottom of the gorge, where time began to distort, moving shapes appeared. They were not souls, but Echoes. The remains of those who had tried to touch Chronos before them and had been fragmented by his power.
"The descent will change," warned Jormund. "From here on, the rock is no longer just stone. It is imbued with time. If you touch the wall in the wrong place, you will age a century in a second."
Siegfried gripped the hilt of his weapon.
"I've already spent eternities in this pit. What's one more century for a man who cannot die?"
"It's not your death they want, Siegfried. It's your existence."
Jormund took another step toward the edge. He concentrated his power. He didn't just look at the path; he began to "read" the layers of time encrusted in the rock. To him, the cliff became a color code: black was stable, gold was dangerous.
"Follow my footsteps," ordered the Anomaly. "If I step into the void, walk where I walk. I will force the matter to remain stable beneath us."
They resumed their descent, but this time Jormund acted as a living bridge between the present and eternity. Each step he anchored into the wall "froze" the rock, preventing temporal distortions from erasing them.
The silence of Tartarus was suddenly broken by a dry, multiple laugh that seemed to come from inside their own skulls. The Fragment of Chronos was only a few leagues away, but the space between them began to twist like molten glass.
"Jormund..." whispered Siegfried, his voice suddenly changing tone, becoming that of a young man, then an old man. "Time... it's leaking out of my pores..."
Jormund turned, his obsidian body glowing with a scarlet light.
"Stay with me, Warrior!"
Jormund grabbed Siegfried by the arm and, in a colossal effort, infused his own mineral stability into the hero's body, halting his erratic aging.
The real descent had begun. They were no longer facing guardians, they were facing the very substance of the universe.