Chapter 574: Rust On The Door

We kept going down.

Nobody decided it. Nobody said it out loud either. It was simply the direction our feet took, one step after the other, along a cliff edge with the mountains leaning over us like a low ceiling.

And here is the strange part. I tried to stop.

About an hour in, the path split. One branch dropped down a crooked slope of loose stone. The other climbed, a narrow ledge winding up and around the shoulder of the rock.

’Up. Let’s try up.’

I took it. Ilse came with me, since the chain was still slack around her waist, and Light and Bren followed without a word.

The ledge climbed for about two hundred paces. Then it turned. Then it turned again. And then it spat us out onto the same crooked slope we had left behind, only lower down.

I stood there and stared at it.

’...Are you serious right now?’

You walked in a circle. A downhill circle. I didn’t know those existed.

’Thanks, Wren. Very helpful.’

I tried again at the next split, and the one after that. Every path that went up ended at a wall, dropped off into nothing, or curled around and handed me back to the same slope, a little lower each time. It was like a shopkeeper who kept walking me back to the only thing he had in stock.

I could question it. I had been questioning it for days.

The problem was that the Precipice never gave me a better answer. Every time I asked, the land shrugged and pointed down.

And honestly, that was how I had been working for weeks. Right up until my strength came back, I had been going wherever the ground tilted and calling it a decision.

Light walked behind me and kept quiet. He hadn’t spoken a word since the wyvern. He kept his sword across his back and his eyes on the path, and when Bren slipped on the loose stone, he caught her elbow without looking at her.

Ilse was still hot. The heat came off her in slow waves and dried the rock wherever she stepped. Even so, she walked with her head up, her horns catching what little light there was.

’Fine. If I can’t choose the road, I’ll use the time.’

Because there was one question that mattered more than the road.

My Soul Sanctum.

I had my essence back. I had my body back. And the door was still shut, and I could feel Kassie’s absence on the other side of it the way you feel a missing tooth with your tongue.

So while my legs followed the slope, I went back through my own head.

The first time this had ever happened to me was the Chameleon.

That perverted lizard. I hated remembering it for many reasons, most of them embarrassing. But the part that mattered was simple. Inside its gate, I hadn’t been able to reach my Sanctum either. And when I killed it, something came into me. Something rotten.

Maggie had been there that time. She burned it out of me before it could settle, and I never thought about it again.

Then there was the Demonic Spirit, back on the Motherling. The soul core. I didn’t enjoy remembering how I broke that thing either, but the notification I could still see clearly.

[A Nefarious Essence has found its way into the depth of your soul after your degenerate and unhealthy act]

[You have gained 500 Essence]

[The nature of this essence, is deeply vile, and disturbing, it is advised that it is burned away quickly, as it is corruptible]

And what had I done with that warning?

I’d made a joke about Maggie being too busy, and shrugged it away.

’Five hundred units of something the system told me to burn quickly. And I never burned it.’

My stomach turned over.

There was one more memory. The one I had never let myself look at, because of when it happened.

Tristan.

When he died on the ice and something dark came up from the bottom of my soul, the Lodestar had been screaming at me, and I hadn’t read a single word of it. I had been too busy wanting the whole world to die. But the panels were still in my memory, the way a sound stays in your ears after a door slams.

[Dark Essence can be used as catalyst to regulate the furious increase]

I stopped walking.

Bren nearly ran into my back.

’Dark Essence.’

It had a name. It had always had a name. The system had handed it to me while I was busy losing my mind, and I had ignored it.

And Uio, standing on the sky above that frozen ocean, had looked at me and said I was tearing into the Spirit River without that shameful act. Without sex. Something else had opened the door that day.

I started walking again before anyone could ask what was wrong.

Dark Essence.

If spirit essence was the water, this was the rust. The same thing, gone bad. It lived in the corrupted summons of the Spirit World, the ones that had rotted in the dark long enough to turn into something else. That was what the Chameleon had carried. That was what came out of the Demonic Spirit’s core.

And the Precipice?

The Precipice was made of it. Every creature down here was the corrupted leftover of something that had once lived. The Lost Mouths. The collector. The Mirror Monkeys. All of it rust.

’So I have rust in me. And I’m standing in a place made of rust.’

My Sanctum hadn’t locked. It had seized, like a door left out in the rain for a hundred years, the hinges gone solid on both sides.

That is a very tidy theory.

’Thanks.’

It wasn’t a compliment. You’re guessing.

’I know I’m guessing. But it’s the first guess I’ve had that fits everything.’

And if you’re right? You burn it out? Maggie is the only one who can do that, and she’s on the other side of the door you’re trying to open.

That was the problem, wasn’t it?

I couldn’t burn it. Purifying Flame burned corruption, yes, but burning was destroying. You don’t open a rusted lock by melting the key.

’...Unless the rust is the key.’

The thought came out of me slowly.

If the Precipice was rust, and the lock was rust, then the only thing inside me that spoke the same language as the lock was the thing I was supposed to have burned. I didn’t need to get rid of the Dark Essence. I needed to learn how to hold it. How to use it.

And then walk in through the back.

That’s either very clever or the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.

’Why not both?’

I tried it, just a little. I closed my eyes while I walked and reached down, the way I reached for essence, only lower. Past the well. Past the place where the new cold weight sat behind my ribs.

It was there.

Something low in my soul, heavy and slow. The same thing that had nudged at me on the ice the day Tristan died. It felt nothing like essence. It felt like a hand under dark water.

And the moment I touched it, it moved.

It rolled toward me, as if it had been waiting.

My eyes snapped open, and my foot came down wrong on the loose stone. The chain snapped tight, and Ilse caught my arm.

"You’re pale."

"I stepped wrong."

She held my arm a moment longer than she needed to, looking at me. She didn’t believe me. She let it go anyway.

’Not yet. Not like that. Not in the middle of a cliff.’

We walked for another hour.

Then Bren stopped.

She didn’t say anything. She put her hand on my shoulder and pointed.

On a ledge across the gap, about forty paces away, something was sitting.

It was small. That was the first thing I noticed, and it didn’t make me feel any better. It was the size of a horse, maybe a little less, with a long neck curled back on itself and its wings folded tight against its sides. Its scales were the colour of old coals, and where they overlapped, a dull orange glow showed through the cracks.

It was watching us.

’Death Sense.’

For once, the sense gave me a number. Small, hot, bright. Measurable.

’...A young one.’

Then something scraped on the rock above us, and a second one crawled out onto the overhang with its head low and its tail swinging.

A third came up out of the drop below. Its claws hooked over the edge of our path, twenty paces ahead.

Everything else in the Precipice had been running from the fight above us.

These weren’t running.

They were coming toward us.