Chapter 86: The Silent Grove

Chapter 86: The Silent Grove

Sky didn’t budge.

His muscles were locked stiff like the stone walls pressing against his sides. His boots seemed to be riveted to the boards underfoot by some primordial sense of dread woven into his very bones.

His eyes remained forward.

A chasm of writhing black shadows devoured the fringe where it met the golden light like an unrelenting tide, one that seemed to actively fight whoever dared to get too close of a look at the unknown behind it.

The old helmet sat motionless at Sky’s feet, the trail of dried up black blood from the wound it had obviously been slung against marking its presence in the dust. Pale blue phosphor light lingered in the heavy hush, the remnants of the ghost’s rolling entry glowing like poison in the cracks of the stone floor.

His Danger Sense flared up again,

only this was a far more insidious shade of red that had been flashing since they had entered the corridor. A deep seated, heavy pressure built at the base of his skull that wasn’t made of pure raw terror. It was an ominous undercurrent of wariness that pressed uncomfortably against his psyche. Don’t move. It didn’t want them to advance, though it certainly didn’t intend to kill them either. Their presence here felt like an intolerable affront to whoever resided in this place of dead stone and the utter isolation it represented.

Vesper slowly straightened theHoly Scepter Blade and let a wide, loose arc of golden light wash over the rough dark granite at their feet. A few lucky sparks of pale, floating dust caught and glittered in the strange illumination as if eager to be gored upon.

"Chloe," Vesper’s murmured voice barely broke past the corridor’s deep walls.

"I know," came the distracted response.

She hovered a gloved hand over her holographic interface, her fingers twitching as if willing her sensors to cooperate. A nervous, erratic glint danced across the reinforced glass of her visor as another pulse of chaotic yellow and red lines painted her retinae in jagged flashes, the HUD rebuilding itself for the twelfth time in as many seconds.

"Still nothing?" Sky’s voice was low, angry. "Nothing?"

"No life signatures. No movement. No power readings at all, " she snarled, her frustration bleeding into the clipped edges of her words. "Passive sonar is flat lining! The array says it’s just a big empty hole in the rock. An unbroken stretch of stone wall with absolutely no volume change within the air! "

She turned her gaze back towards the yawning void with a troubled frown creasing her brow.

"That’s what worries me. A helmet doesn’t simply roll itself around a corridor out of vacuous space. No matter how densely packed, the entire system is effectively blind against us, Sky."

Sky let out a slow breath and released his Soul Clone. His fingers curled against the deep, taut pouch of his utility belt, the small rush of air escaping his lungs carrying with it all the air he had inhaled before now. He focused, and a shadow detached itself from him and sunk into the stone like a ghost on a secret errand of its own.

It hovered a hand width above the ground, drifting smoothly down the tunnel past the skeletal armor flanking the corridor and thick, ancient roots tangled between broken helmets.

Ten meters

Twenty

Thirty.

Sky felt the sudden pressure against his soul tighten, a deep, grating sense of unease building in his core as his senses struggled to account for some unknown, unknowable thing he had picked up on along the way. There was nothing in the way of lifeforms or power signatures, nothing at all beyond this unnerving sensation of being stared down at from the dark stone walls around him. That was the worst part of it. They weren’t simply invisible entities, not in the traditional combat sense. Their presence felt more like an oppressive weight against his thoughts, picking away at his emotions with a blunt force of willpower.

The Soul Clone reached a new stretch of tunnel, its reinforced visor reflecting the flickering beams of golden light that spilled from the Holy Scepter Blade. The wide walls curved in to narrow suddenly, presenting an enormous expanse of unbroken stone floor punctuated by more and more frequent skeletal remains and scattered, half-buried pieces of blackened armor.

The chamber was significantly colder.

This wasn’t the same physical shift of temperature in the air, but something deeper, more conceptual and deeply unpleasant. It had more to do with the feeling of being physically drained rather than a lowering of bodily warmth.

A vast opening yawned ahead, replacing the usual broad, heavy stones pressing in on either side with a sheer emptiness so profound the Soul Clone felt momentarily disoriented as it searched for an edge to hang off of. The construct moved forward through the threshold.

A huge expanse of space stretched out before it on either side, the chamber walls vanishing into a haze of swirling shadows at its limit. The Soul Clone floated through the air into the great hall, and Sky’s jaw dropped slightly as his clone’s eyes adjusted.

Trees.

Hundreds , no thousands of them pierced the ceiling of this underground forest, stretching their skeletal roots deep into the earth in a tangled labyrinth of pale bone-like wood. The massive root systems arched up and laced together overhead in a writhing canopy of interlocking limbs, casting the floor of this subterranean expanse into perpetual darkness despite the strange, pale golden glow that drifted from the cracklings of the chamber walls.

They were all uniformly chalk white, taller than any above-ground tree in existence and possessing a strange, naturalistic quality to them aside from the obvious unnaturalness of their sheer abundance in this enclosed, walled space.

Sky felt his stomach twist at the sight of the massive trees. Something about them felt wrong, even twisted somehow in a fundamental way he couldn’t quite place.

What was most horrifying was that they weren’t trees at all.

The Soul Clone moved forward and closer, drifting past the neat rows of pale trees on the outside of the forest until it reached the center. An enormous tree , the size of a ten story building , stretched upward from a patchwork of smaller, similar groves. Its wide trunk , thick enough to split a man in half from a few feet away ,was made of the same pale, white material of its lesser cousins but twisted in upon itself in a grotesque mockery of a healthy heart. Thick roots ran from the bottom of the monstrosity, weaving back and forth across the chamber in neat intervals that looked suspiciously like the sinew of muscle.

And beneath the surface of this tree’s broad roots , bones jutted out from the splintering wood. Skulls grinned back at the Soul Clone, their dark, hollow eye sockets seeming to burn with an inner, malicious light. Ribcages were embedded throughout the rough wood bark , their bones pushed outwards by years of slow, methodical decay until their skeletal bodies were practically fused into the tree itself, and countless other fragments of pale bone were visible sticking out from the trunks and branches around them.

The sight of the great, pale tree and its surroundings was almost enough to still Sky’s breath, but the feeling of weight pressing at his clone’s back reminded him that he had one far heavier burden to bear before he could take in a proper lungful of air.

"They’re real," he muttered, closing his eyes as he fought hard to stop his fingers from shaking. The words of his Soul Clone were a revelation of their own weight, the sheer presence of such a structure pressing in on him from all sides and demanding equal parts of awe and revulsion from him. "There’s a f orest.

"Vesper blinked rapidly, her scepter dipping slightly as she took in the words and the look currently on Sky’s face. "How big was it?" "Massive ."Sky took slow, deliberate breaths as he processed what he had seen. "There are trees... trees everywhere. Huge, white trees. Like chalk or bone. And there’s something in the middle."

Chloe immediately went to work on a custom patch for her mapping utility, using the limited description Sky had provided to begin overlaying a wireframe representation of the suspected area for her to follow. "Can your clone get near enough to see what it is?" she asked, tapping out a rough perimeter for reference. "If you can somehow get us a layout of what’s in the center, I can probably narrow in on the rough area where the explorers’ extraction point was." "I don’t see why not ," he muttered, wincing as the pressure against his clone’s soul forced him to bite back a grunt. He took a final, steadying breath before sending the construct forward.

The Soul Clone advanced through the chamber, passing into the thick of the pale trees and their winding labyrinth of roots until there was nothing left but the vast, writhing darkness beyond the great grove. ℯℯ𝑙.

Nothing happened.

Not even the strange golden glow in the chamber walls seemed inclined to disturb the uneasy peace, and Sky’s fingers twitched against the hilt of his sidearm as he exhaled a tense, shivering breath into the air. Even Sky and Chloe’s combined efforts of silent concentration could barely manage to maintain such an absolutely dead ambiance. Their eyes darted around nervously, every shadow and patch of darkness seeming like it might have teeth or eyes or worse, be hiding something that very much so had them by their neck. The only other sound that broke the tense stillness of the chamber was a low, slow beat as a strange, pounding heartbeat echoed from the center of the grove.

Then it came upon the clone.

A sudden, massive weight settled against the Soul Clone’s back, far heavier this time and powerful enough to physically stop the construct dead in its tracks. Sky’s eyes shot open as his nerves sent out a hot, searing jolt of pain throughout his skull and a sharp, jolting pressure knocked the air out of his lungs.

His connection to the clone had vanished, and it wasn’t from natural causes.

Something had a hold of it from the other end of the line, something far stronger than he had ever struggled against when he used his Soul Clones in combat. If he wasn’t careful, whatever force the dark entity in the chamber was that had taken his clone was going to cut off his life source outright, body and mind alike. He struggled against the invisible leash at the center of his soul, but the hold was ironclad and seemed to bite into the very marrow of his bones. Sky’s hands gripped his temples hard, his knuckles whitening around his face as he tried to force his thoughts back together. "Something’s wrong ."

His voice barely left his gaping, salivating mouth before Chloe’s visor turned towards him, an amber pulse of concern breaking against his mind. "What happened?" Sky turned his eyes back towards the entrance of the chamber, his breath growing shallow and quick as he stared into the black void that encompassed the pale forest grove. "I lost my clone ." he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "It wasn’t severed... It was taken. Something over there had a hold of it from the other end."

Another dull, pounding heartbeat echoed through the chamber

this one close enough that Sky could feel his own pulse begin to rise in time with it. A low, threatening rumble of air rushed past them.

Deep beneath the pale roots of the enormous center tree, a low throbbing hum began to rise, signaling the end of a deep, prolonged feeding session