Two weeks.
That's how long it took us to cross the Wastelands.
Fourteen days of dust, silence, and broken memories carved into the earth. No roads. No shelter. Just ruin after ruin, stretched like scars across the skin of a dying world. We moved at dawn. Slept in shifts. Ate what we could salvage, drank when we found water that didn't smell like metal or worse.
The nights were the hardest.
Not because of the cold. But because the stars didn't feel right anymore.
I couldn't explain it. Neither could Violet. But they looked wrong. Like something had shifted them while we weren't looking.
We passed shattered outposts, burned-down camps, remnants of old convoys half-buried in red sand. Sometimes we found bones. Sometimes entire suits of armor left standing with nothing inside.
The edge of the Wastelands didn't come like a line. It came like a change in the breath.
Violet and I felt it before we saw it.
NULL.
Not just flickers in the air, not just residual traces from Dracus weapons or abandoned sigils. This was thick. Syrupy. Breathing.
The wind shifted. The color of the sky dipped to a dull violet hue.
We stood at the crest of a narrow bluff. Before us stretched a basin swallowed in fog—not natural mist, but NULL-born vapor. It clung to the landscape like rot. The trees down there, if you could still call them trees, were twisted into shapes that didn't belong in this world.
Roots above ground. Trunks that split into veins.
"The Miasma Zone," Violet said quietly.
I didn't respond at first. I just stared.
NULL shimmered in the distance like heat, rising in slow pulses. Every instinct told me to turn back.
But I had no instincts left to listen to.
Only resolve.
"This is where it begins," I said.
Violet nodded, pulling her hood tight.
We stepped forward.
Into the haze.
The air changed the moment we crossed the threshold.
It tasted like electricity and rot. Heavy in the lungs. Alive.
NULL pressed against my skin like static. Not violent—not yet—but curious. Like it was feeling us back. Trying to understand what we were made of.
I kept moving.
Violet walked close. Closer than before. Even she didn't trust the space around us anymore. Every sound here echoed strangely, like it bounced through layers of something we couldn't see.
The terrain dipped into low, winding ravines carved by the passage of something large. I didn't know if it had been a creature, a machine, or the NULL itself.
We passed wreckage that didn't look like anything from our world—sharp angles, alien geometry, broken constructs humming faintly even in ruin. One pulsed as we passed, casting our shadows across the fog in long, jagged streaks.
"Don't touch anything," Violet whispered. "Nothing that still glows."
I didn't need the warning.
The deeper we moved, the more I felt the glyph beneath my collarbones stir. Like it recognized the atmosphere. Like it was breathing in sync with the zone.
I didn't tell Violet.
Not yet.
The trees became denser. Bent backward. Their branches like tendrils grasping toward something that wasn't there.
And through the haze ahead—a light.
Not warm. Not inviting.
But rhythmic. Slow. A dull, pale glow blinking in intervals.
Like a signal.
Or a warning.
We didn't stop.
We were past the point of stopping.
As we moved closer to the light, the fog thinned just enough for shapes to emerge.
Broken pylons, cracked stone pillars, and fragments of architecture suspended in midair, floating as if gravity worked differently here. The structures were ancient—not in design, but in feeling. Like they'd existed before anything had names.
We passed beneath one, and it hummed. Not loud. Not hostile. Just... aware.
I glanced at Violet. She felt it too. Her hand hovered near her blade, eyes scanning the mists like they might turn solid.
"This place remembers," she said.
I nodded.
The blinking light pulsed again, stronger now, coming from just beyond a series of jagged obelisks that spiraled upward like broken ribs. NULL clung to them in threads, stretching like sinew.
I moved toward it.
And then it stopped blinking.
Just one long, steady glow.
I slowed.
So did Violet.
We weren't alone.
Something moved through the fog ahead—a silhouette. Too tall. Too thin. Its limbs swayed with each step, like they weren't made of bone. I couldn't see a face, but I felt its eyes.
It stopped when it saw us.
And tilted its head.
NULL pulsed around it in waves.
"Matte," Violet whispered. "That's not Dracus. That's something older."
I reached for Voidscar.
But the thing didn't move.
It just... stood there.
Like it was waiting.
I didn't move.
Neither did it.
We stared across the fog, caught in a silence that felt too loud. The NULL between us rippled—slow, deliberate pulses like a heartbeat shared through the air. It was measuring me. Testing the weight of my presence the way a predator sizes up something unfamiliar.
Violet's voice cut through low, steady. "We should go around."
I shook my head. "It'll follow."
Her eyes flicked to me. "Then what do you suggest?"
"I want to see what it does."
The figure tilted its head again. A long, jerking motion—almost curious. Like it had heard me, even though I hadn't spoken loud enough for anything human to register.
Then it took a step forward.
Not aggressive.
Not hesitant.
Just... certain.
I gripped Voidscar's hilt tighter. The glyph beneath my skin throbbed in time with the NULL in the air, like it recognized the shape ahead—or had been shaped by it. My breath hitched, not from fear, but from something deeper. Something ancestral.
And then the creature did something I didn't expect.
It knelt.
Not fully. One elongated leg bent slightly, one arm stretched outward.
A gesture.
Not submission.
Acknowledgment.
Like it had seen something it recognized in me.
Violet drew her blade slowly. "Matte…"
I held up a hand. "Wait."
The creature's hand reached toward the ground, pressing two long fingers into the dirt. Where it touched, NULL flared out in a perfect circle—silent, glowing lines that pulsed once, then faded.
A sigil.
Old.
Familiar.
I didn't know how I knew it… but I did.
And just like that, it turned.
Walked away.
The fog swallowed it whole.
We stood there, both of us frozen.
The sigil still faintly glowed beneath our boots.
Violet whispered, "What the hell was that?"
I didn't have an answer.
But the mark on my chest wouldn't stop burning.
The fog thickened again once the creature vanished, as if it had never been there at all.
But the sigil it left behind… it stayed.
I crouched beside it, tracing the faint lines with my eyes, not touching. They spiraled inward—not like a trap, but like a door. Like something meant to be opened by the right presence, the right essence. And even though the lines were fading, the memory of their energy stayed etched in the ground like the NULL had burned its intent into the soil itself.
"It knew you," Violet said behind me.
I didn't respond. I was still staring at the lines.
"No," she added, correcting herself. "Not knew. It… recognized something inside you. Like it was checking to see if you were still what you used to be."
Still what I used to be.
That sentence felt heavier than it should've.
I stood.
The glyph beneath my skin was quiet now. Not pulsing. Not warning. Just there. Like it had been acknowledged by something older and had no reason to fight it.
I looked into the fog ahead, where the thing had disappeared.
"They're watching," I murmured. "Even here."
Violet didn't ask who. She didn't need to.
Her silence told me she was thinking the same thing I was:
If this was only the beginning of the Miasma Zone…
What the hell waited for us deeper in?
We kept moving.
The terrain shifted beneath our feet—rock giving way to something softer, spongier. Moss, but not the kind that grew from moisture. This stuff pulsed slightly, like it was drawing breath beneath the surface. At one point, I saw something buried just beneath the growth. Machinery maybe. Bone. Couldn't tell. I didn't stop to check.
We passed old markers along the way. Obsidian slabs etched with symbols, half-buried and leaning. Some had words in languages I didn't recognize. Others just had a single rune, scratched deep into the surface like a warning for anyone foolish enough to pass.
One of them had a crude carving at the base.
It looked like a person.
Split down the middle.
One half human.One half something else.Veins of NULL etched into the stone like a parasite trying to take root.
Violet stared at it longer than I expected.
"You okay?" I asked.
She didn't look at me. "That figure… I've seen it before. Deep in the archives, during a study cycle in the lower settlements. They called it 'The Divided.'"
"What was it?"
She finally turned to me. "A prophecy. Or a record. They weren't sure. It spoke of a soul that would carry both ends of the spectrum—NULL and another power not defined by our worldly characteristics. One who couldn't be corrupted, because they were never meant to be part of either side to begin with."
I stared at the carving again.
The longer I looked at it… the more I hated how familiar it felt.
"Is it meant to be a warning?" I asked.
Violet's expression was unreadable. "Or a signpost."
Either way, we kept walking.
And somewhere behind us… I swore I heard the sound of footsteps echoing once more through the fog.
But when I turned around—
There was nothing.
Only the mist.
Breathing.
Waiting.