Chapter 16: Beneath the Pit
865 Words
Chapter 16: Beneath the Pit
"Ready, Ninth Vein?"
Rowan’s voice fractured the quiet like a blade across ice.
Aric Blackthorn blinked once, slow and unreadable, before peeling his gaze from Seris. His eyes shifted, not lazily, but with terrifying clarity, to Rowan.
He nodded once.
Rowan snapped the reins of his Gravethorn. The beast snorted, embers rising from its nostrils like it resented being tamed. Aric followed suit, his own Gravethorn obeying with a rumble, and Seris flanked him silently.
They moved as one toward the gate.
It wasn’t just massive. It was impossibly massive — a slab of forged obsidian laced with spell-etched silver, bound in mechanisms older than the dome itself.
Rowan gave a slight nod to the guards.
With a sound like dying titans, the gates groaned open. Chains snarled. Runes flared a dull red. Gears locked and unlocked with the weight of entire cities.
A wind shrieked through the widening divide — cold, bitter, and sharp with metallic tang.
Aric’s jacket flared behind him. His hair danced in the cyclone of ash and grit. His eyes, however, didn’t flicker.
They burned forward.
Rowan’s Gravethorn surged first, his mount pounding into the open wilds. Aric and Seris followed, the gates collapsing behind them with a thundering finality.
The fortress vanished behind steel and rune.
Before them lay the Blight Expanse: cracked earth veined with black mana scars, air that pulsed with residual dread, and a sky that looked bruised from remembering too many dead.
They rode.
The rhythm of hooves across wasteland wasn't noise — it was ceremony. A tempo of final steps. Rowan matched Aric’s speed with effortless subtlety. He had no interest in rushing this death march. If Aric wanted to savor his last few breaths, Rowan would not deny him that courtesy.
Silence stretched between them, thick and stretching like warped glass.
Aric’s gaze cut through the horizon like a blade refusing to dull. Seris rode beside him, her jaw tight, her brow furrowed — like she wanted to speak, but didn’t yet know how to cut her way past the silence.
Rowan noticed Aric’s fixation on the ruined expanse, how his stare lingered like he could will understanding into its scars.
He shifted closer.
"The Veil Wars did this," Rowan said, his voice quieter now, almost reverent. "The soil used to fight back. Now it just remembers."
Aric said nothing.
Rowan continued.
"Every end of month, it tries to heal. Grass sprouts. Color fights to return. But the Pit bleeds again, and it all withers like it’s apologizing for existing."
At the mention of the Pit, Aric’s eyes narrowed — a flicker, sharp and subtle.
Rowan saw it. So he threw the bait.
"Do you even know the real story of the Pit?"
Aric answered instantly. "Darkspawn. Monthly cycles. Kill or die."
Rowan chuckled, dry and weathered. "That’s the convenient version. The sanitized bedtime horror."
Seris’s head tilted. She’d heard that tone before — right before classified secrets got accidentally ‘slipped.’
Rowan’s voice dropped, now intimate. "What I’m about to say doesn’t leave this ash-field. Only the core of the Blackthorn knows it. And the ones who survived it."
Aric didn’t nod. He didn’t blink. But he was listening.
Seris gave the only acknowledgment that mattered: a quiet nod of understanding, binding herself to the secrecy.
Rowan exhaled through his nose, a soldier remembering too many corpses.
"You were told the truth. Just not the whole of it."
"After the Barrier Dome sealed, humanity rebuilt. Grew proud. Grew soft. Then came the pits. Black maws punched through the earth like infected wounds. From them came Darkspawn — nightmares given muscle and breath. Humanity flinched."
"They weren’t prepared. No one was. Warriors died in waves. Then the real horror hit. The fallen weren’t just corpses. They became conduits. The enemy possessed them, slipped through like smoke, entered the dome."
He paused.
"That’s the part you know. The public truth. Now, for the heresy."
Aric and Seris leaned in without moving an inch.
Rowan’s Gravethorn rumbled beneath him.
"After the first wave was repelled, humanity’s finest did something reckless: they entered the Pit."
Seris’s eyes widened. Aric’s brow twitched.
"They weren’t supposed to come back. But they did. All of them. Alive. Unscathed. Unchanged… almost."
"And what they described wasn’t a hell."
"It was a theater."
Aric’s pulse shifted. Rowan felt it.
"They said the Pit wasn’t a realm of death, but simulation. It responded to thought. They could summon enemies at will. Control the difficulty. The numbers. The terrain. It wasn’t chaos. It was… designed."
Aric’s lips parted. Barely.
"You're thinking what they thought," Rowan murmured. "A training ground. A gift."
"And for a while, it was."
Rowan’s voice dipped into cold memory.
"Until the greed came."
"The strong started sending their children in. Noble blood. Heirs. Hundreds of them."
"And none came back."
Seris stiffened.
"Not even bones?" Aric asked.
"Nothing," Rowan replied. "As if the Pit… kept them."
"The dome went mad. Entire squads vanished trying to retrieve them. No trace. No echo. Just silence."
He looked at Aric fully now.
"You are walking into the same Pit."
"But maybe this time… it’s waiting for you."
- Writer
