Hollow System Ascension

The Records interior

The first thing he noticed was the silence. The second thing he noticed was that he could breathe. He tried his legs, and they responded cleanly, the paralytic resonance gone as though it had been a local condition that hadn't followed him through, which apparently it hadn't.

He stood up.

The rubble was gone. The dungeon was gone. He was standing on a surface that was flat and dark and caught ambient light the way still water caught it, reflective without being wet, solid without the give of stone. It extended in every direction to a horizon that was too far away and too level to be natural.

Above him was a sky that wasn't a sky. Deep layered dark, threaded through with long arcing lines of pale light that ran from one edge of the visible space to the other in slow, deliberate curves. Not stars. Too precise for stars. More like the internals of something vast, seen from the wrong angle.

He stood there and let his eyes finish adjusting.

'Okay,' he thought. 'Alive. That's where we start.'

His pack was still on his back.

He unslung it and went through it the way Minho had taught him, methodically, left to right, front to back, no skipping.He looked at the water for a long moment, then clipped it back without drinking.

'Not yet.'

He repacked everything, stood, and looked at the horizon, then he picked up his pack and started walking toward it.

The space had a quality he kept trying to find the right word for. Vast was accurate but insufficient. It wasn't oppressive the way vast underground spaces were; there was no ceiling pressing down, no sense of weight above him. It was more like being the only object in a room that was also a universe, and the room was completely aware of that fact and had no particular feeling about it.

Indifferent. That was the word.

He reached the terminus point after what felt like twenty minutes of walking, though he had no reliable way to measure time here. The ground around it was slightly raised, a circular platform, three metres across, the surface luminous rather than reflective. The light-line above it moved in a slow rotation around the termination point, unhurried, like something counting in a unit he didn't have a name for.

He stopped at the edge and looked at it.

Nothing threatening about it. Nothing welcoming either. It existed the way old things existed, with the patience of something that had been here before he arrived and would be here after he left.

He stepped onto it.

The light-line above stilled. The surface beneath his feet shifted from luminous to something warmer, and somewhere in the structure of the place, he felt a change in pressure, then a sound. The first sound he'd heard since arriving, low, resonant, coming from the ground itself, the way the Cathedral-type Fractures hummed, but cleaner. More intentional. It lasted four seconds and faded, and in the silence after it, the quality of the space had changed in a way he couldn't quantify but could feel clearly.

Something knew he was here now.

He stepped off the platform and kept moving.

The second landmark appeared an hour later. It was a structure. The first structure he'd seen since arriving, rising from the flat ground ahead of him with the particular quality of something that had always been there and wasn't hiding the fact. It was roughly the size of a house, roughly rectangular, and made of the same material as the ground, dark, reflective, solid. But its surfaces weren't flat. They were covered in a dense layering of marks, carved deep into the material, running in columns from base to apex.

He stepped back and kept moving.

He found water three hours later, at the point when he'd started thinking about it seriously.

It came up from the ground at a low point in the terrai, not a spring exactly, more a seep, the reflective surface giving way to a slow upwelling that collected in a shallow basin about a metre across. He crouched beside it and looked at it for a long time. Clear. No smell. The ground around the basin had the same recording quality as the rest of the surface but more concentrated, brighter, as though this point had been visited often.

'Things come here to drink,' he thought. 'Something does, anyway.'

He pulled the water testing strip from the medkit, a basic chemical analysis, good for the most common contaminants, and dipped it. The strip came back clean on everything it could test for, which was not everything, but it was the information he had.

He drank carefully. Refilled the canteen. Ate half a Ration bar and then he sat beside the basin and let himself be still for a moment. 'You're in a dimension inside a Fracture,' he thought. 'You have no class, no skills, no way back that you know of, and no idea what the trial wants from you. You have a knife, some rope, and the same observational habit that got you through six years of being the least important person in every room.'

He watched the water seep upward.

'Seems about right,' he thought.

—

He heard it before he saw it.

He'd been moving again for what felt like another hour, tracking a faint change in the overhead light-lines that seemed to indicate a convergence point somewhere ahead. It was not a plan exactly; it was just that a direction was better than no direction at all.

The sound stopped him mid-step.

It was low and periodic. Regular enough to be a pattern, irregular enough to be organic. Coming from his left, from somewhere beyond a cluster of the dark structures he'd been passing more frequently, smaller than the first one, uncarved, arranged in no pattern he could determine.

He went still.

The sound came again. Three beats, close together. Then silence. Then three beats.

'Not the ground,' he thought. 'Someone…something is moving.'

He turned toward it slowly, the way you turned toward sounds in dungeons, no sudden movement, no change in breath pattern, the whole body going to the particular low-energy alertness that six years in hostile environments built whether you wanted it or not.

He moved between the structures, keeping his shoulder to the dark material, and looked around the edge of the last one.

It was roughly the size of a large dog.

That was the first thing, scale, always scale first, because scale told you whether the calculation was survivable. Roughly dog-sized, crouched low against the ground, its silhouette was… wrong. It had too many joints in the legs. A head that was slightly too wide, with no visible features on the face except two points of pale light where eyes would be.

It was looking at something on the ground in front of it. The three-beat sound came again, its forelimb striking the reflective surface in a pattern and feeding, maybe. Or communicating. Or something with no equivalent word in any language he had access to.

'Don't move,' he told himself. 'You're downwind, if wind is even a thing here, and it hasn't looked up.'

The nightmarish creature had no visible weapons, which was a meaningless category for fauna in dimensional spaces. The joints suggested speed, the kind of leg configuration that traded stability for acceleration, built to close distances fast. The pale eye-points hadn't moved from the ground, which meant either it hadn't detected him yet, or it was waiting.

He began backing up one slow step at a time.

The second step produced a sound. Not loud, the soft compression of his boot against the reflective surface, the faint responsive brightening that the ground made when he moved.

The pale eye-points came up.

He went completely still.

Three seconds of nothing, the eye-points fixed in his direction, the creature motionless in its crouch, the whole space holding the particular breath of a situation that had not yet decided what it was going to be.

Then, it moved.

Not toward him, sideways, fast, the wrong-jointed legs covering ground in a movement pattern that didn't map to anything he'd seen in a dungeon or a paper, circling left with a speed that put it behind him before he'd fully processed it had moved at all.

'Flanking,' he thought, and the cold clarity of it arrived before the fear did. 'It's flanking you. It's done this before.'

He turned to keep it in front of him and his back met the structure behind him, the carved surface solid against his shoulders, which was one direction covered and also a problem because the creature had known the structure was there, had driven him into it, and now it stopped moving and looked at him from twelve feet away with those two pale points of light and made no sound at all.

His hand found the utility knife on his belt, and almost in response, the creature lowered itself another inch toward the ground, the pre-lunge compression bulging the musculature of the beast to terrifying proportions.

'Dam-,' he thought.

It came at him all at once.