---
Chapter 4: Whispers Beneath the Ashes
The silence after the storm was heavier than the storm itself.
Erevan stood at the edge of the shattered plaza, the ruins of the stone pillars still glowing faintly with residual arcane heat. The wind had stilled—as if the very world held its breath, waiting for what he would do next. Blood, not his, painted the ground in abstract patterns. The few survivors, if they could still be called that, cowered in the shadows, too broken to speak, too afraid to run.
He didn't even spare them a glance.
His eyes, once bright with youthful defiance, were now coal embers—dim, steady, and smoldering with purpose. He walked slowly, boots crunching over broken bone and splintered marble, toward the remnants of the spire at the plaza's center. The System Node, now cracked and useless, fizzled weak sparks like a dying heart monitor. Erevan knelt beside it and placed one hand on the fractured surface.
"This one won't hold," he muttered. "They're getting smarter."
The voice came not from outside, but from within. A thread of thought, a cold presence laced with static and echo.
> "Their patterns have shifted. The Tower watches. The deeper you go, the more it adapts."
Erevan didn't respond. The voice was part of him now—remnant of something he once rejected, something he now wielded like a weapon. The System, or at least the splinter of it grafted to his essence, pulsed faintly. Information streamed into his mind: names of watchers, probability trees of ambushes, hidden quests he'd long since refused to chase.
He closed his eyes, exhaling slow. "Let them watch."
A memory surfaced—brief, cruel.
A girl standing beneath the same tower, her hand in his, her voice warm like sunlight through cracked shutters.
> "Promise me you'll never become like them."
He had broken that promise a hundred times over.
And yet—something within him still clung to the echo of that warmth.
He rose, cloak billowing as the corrupted node crumbled to dust. A flicker in the air ahead signaled the next phase: the labyrinthine corridors of Sanctum 5-A, one of the hidden layers not meant for ordinary climbers. It was sealed unless one triggered a 'False Ascension'—a system glitch achieved by deliberately corrupting the progression path.
He had done so.
The shimmering gateway tore open with a screech, exposing a tunnel of shifting stone and bone, flickering in and out of phase with itself. Time bent around it. Sanity frayed just from looking at it.
Erevan stepped forward.
Then paused.
Footsteps echoed behind him—light, hesitant.
He didn't need to look to know who it was.
"Why do you follow me?" His voice was cold steel.
The girl stepped into view. Not the one from his past—no, she was long gone—but a new face, too young, too bright-eyed, still wearing hope like armor that hadn't yet been dented.
"Because you left me a choice," she said quietly, "and I chose you."
He turned, slowly. Her name was Kaelith. Just another temporary companion offered by the Tower's shifting fate. She wasn't supposed to make it past the third trial. And yet, here she was—scraped, burned, determined.
"I'm not your hero," he said.
"I know."
"I don't save people."
"I didn't ask you to."
His expression didn't change, but something in his stance softened. Barely.
"You'll die here."
Kaelith shrugged. "Maybe. But if I'm going to die, better beside a monster I chose than a savior who abandoned us."
That word—monster—clung to him like a title now. He no longer flinched at it.
He turned without another word and stepped into the portal.
She followed.
---
The labyrinth devoured them.
Sanctum 5-A was not a place of trials—it was a graveyard of forgotten climbers. The walls pulsed with memories, bleeding screams from cracks in the stone. Illusions layered over reality. Not all of them were false.
Here, Erevan moved like a phantom, unfazed by the horrors. He had walked among worse.
Kaelith stumbled once, twice, gasping at the weight of fear that pressed into her mind like lead.
"How… do you—how can you move through this like it's nothing?" she whispered.
He didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he stopped before a wall that bore a sigil—a spiral of broken wings. His hand hovered over it, and the stone hissed in recognition.
"I stopped letting it hurt," he said at last. "A long time ago."
"Did that help?"
"No."
The wall split apart, revealing a chamber filled with statues—each one carved in agonizing detail, each one a climber frozen at the moment of death. Expressions of fear, betrayal, confusion. Their names hovered above them in flickering glyphs.
One of them bore his name.
Kaelith froze. "That's—"
"A failed version of me," Erevan said quietly. "Another timeline. Another climb."
"But why show it to you?"
"To remind me."
She looked at him, confused. "Of what?"
He turned, his gaze burning with quiet intensity.
"That I'm the only one left who can break this."
And somewhere behind that steel resolve—buried beneath the ashes and the cold—was a reason.
A truth he hadn't yet spoken aloud.
---
End of Chapter 4