CHAPTER 128
A Road Through Nothing
Where once there was a black sea of spiders, a swarm far more vast than anything the chainrunners had ever faced, now there was only snow and ice.
The great landmarks that had once belonged to District 6 were gone. The tall spires, the structures, the facilities whose purposes we didn’t even know, all of it had been erased. What little remained was buried beneath snow.
We stepped out of the shattered ice shelter into a world I didn’t recognize.
Snow reached up to my waist in places, and every direction looked the same. White and endless, a vista broken only by the jagged stumps of buildings that had been strong enough to survive the winds, though none of them had survived whole.
Around us, the snow began to move.
The layers closest to the ground trembled first, then the surface cracked in long straight lines as if an invisible blade were scoring it. The snow along those lines simply sank, compressing downward with a low grinding sound, packing itself flat and hard.
Meanwhile, the snow in our path, the Via Appia, started to slide to the sides, and what remained sank even deeper, pressed solid enough to be walked on.
It happened on both sides simultaneously, perfectly even, the road clearing step by step as we watched.
That invisible force reshaping the land was one we all knew well. Omen was clearing the path. Of course he was. For him, this might have been merely a setback.
Martin appeared beside me. His face was blue from the cold, his lips split and bleeding at the corners, and his eyes had that hollow, faraway look I’d seen on veterans after bad runs. He watched the snow parting ahead of us for a long time before speaking.
“We are still supposed to continue instead of retreating?”
I could do little more than ponder it as well.
Should we really continue?
Honestly, I felt as if it didn’t matter what we decided. This looked like nothing more than a nightmare and I hoped to wake up at any moment.
However, deep down, I knew better. In the same way, I also knew that stopping here, refusing to go on, would mean making the sacrifices of those who died worth nothing.
“We are more than halfway there. It would be best to continue rather than return,” I said while I looked around.
“Shit… you’re right.”
As the snow settled, the city revealed itself more completely, even through the fog. Yet something was amiss. “Where are the beasts?”
We were supposed to continue the run as soon as possible. After all, we were still in the fog. But there were simply no beasts we could see, much less hear.
Besides, most of us had no energy to continue right away. Some were even unconscious and had to be loaded into the wagons before we could move. Luckily, the horses of those who had fallen would follow on their own. They were smart enough for that.
Meanwhile, Gustav began retrieving heavy coats from his artifact ring. Thick, fur-lined things that restrained our movements severely, but that could at least help us endure the cold that now permeated the land.
“Are you kidding me? He had coats all along?” Martin asked, shivering as he pulled one on.
“Shhh...” Tom approached us. “He’s going to hear you. Don’t forget he’s still lusting for blood because of that cursed artifact of his.”
Martin remembered, then suddenly placed a hand over his mouth. When he spoke again, it was quieter. “I’m just saying that... well... he could have distributed those earlier.”
“He could,” I replied. “But it would have been dangerous to do so. We could reenter battle at any moment, and I don’t believe we can fight well wearing this.”
Tom nodded in agreement, but Martin still seemed angry about it. “So now what? No beasts then? Did they scare away?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they all died.”
Martin didn’t answer right away. He looked out at the snow, at the ruins barely visible beneath it, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was. The swarm had been enormous. It had covered everything. And now there was nothing.
Even the distant beasts might be dead too.
“All of them?” He seemed to shiver even more once he realized.
With no beasts in sight, there was also a heavy silence pressing against my ears until I started hearing things that weren’t there. Even our own words seemed loud, too loud, as if the land didn’t want us speaking.
Any beast would have been heard from far away, yet we heard nothing but the chainrunners around us and the wind from time to time.
Weak winds. Nothing like before. Yet their sound was strange, almost mesmerizing, and if I paid enough attention, they seemed to carry something within them. Not just cold, not just snow, but whispers. Faint words that slipped past my ears before I could grasp them, always just beyond understanding.
I thought I was losing my mind. Plenty of chainrunners did after runs like this, and no one would have blamed me. But then one of those whispers became clear and familiar.
“Simon.”
Faint. Brief. One moment it was there and the next it was gone. Along with a sensation at the back of my neck, a presence, someone standing close enough behind me that I should have felt their breath.
I turned. Nobody. The snow behind me was undisturbed.
But the voice had been Harold’s.
“Harold?” I said it out loud before I could stop myself. “Are you here?”
Martin and Tom both turned to look at me. The expression on their faces was careful and measured as they tried to figure out how far gone I was.
“Did you hear something?” Tom asked. He kept his voice level, but I could hear what was underneath it.
“It was Harold. I heard him say my name. Didn’t you hear it?”
“Simon… Harold died. You saw it happen. Gorin tried to catch him, but he couldn’t. You saw,” Martin said.
“I know he died. I know that. But I heard him just now, his voice, right behind me. And there were others too, in the wind, not just him.”
“Others,” Tom repeated flatly.
“I know how it sounds.”
“Do you?”
“Tom.” Martin put a hand up. Then he turned back to me and he didn’t say anything for a moment, just studied my face. I could see him deciding. “All right. You heard something. Let’s keep moving.”
They didn’t believe me. But they clearly thought it was unwise to push the matter now. Not while we were still in the fog.
Yet before any of us could mount our horses, Omen appeared beside us.
None of us saw him approaching. One moment, there was nothing but snow and empty road, and the next, he was simply there, standing among us as if he had always been. We were obviously startled.
The snow around his feet was perfectly flat, undisturbed, as if he weighed nothing.
We were standing in the fog itself, the land of monsters. Despite the strange calm that had settled over us once the adrenaline drained from our veins, none of us forgot the danger that could be lurking around any corner or the fact that beasts would come sooner or later.
And now, standing before us, was the thing that frightened us most.
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The facade was gone. Whatever thin layer of humanity Omen had worn as a chainrunner had been stripped away during the battle. This was a deity. The same deity that had reshaped the land and felled another of its kind. The snow did not touch him. The wind did not seem to reach him.
He stood perfectly still, and the air around him felt heavier, as if reality itself bent slightly in his presence.
I had thought him a devil when the ice broke. But he was the sole reason we weren’t all dead, and devils don’t save people. Maybe he was something else entirely. An angel, perhaps, sent to this cursed city to deliver us from it. That was what I hoped for, at least. But hope or not, standing before him didn’t make me feel any less small.
“You hear them too?” he asked, a hint of curiosity on his face.
“I do,” was all I said, knowing he referred to the sounds the wind carried.
“What a terrible curse, to be attuned to them. You shouldn’t be able to listen to them so easily, none of you should… but I guess that’s my fault,” he told me, no hint of skepticism on his face.
“Curse?” I asked. “What are they? These whispers? These voices? I could swear I just heard Harold speaking to me.”
Omen turned to me fully for a moment. He seemed to ponder whether to give me an answer or not. Eventually, he did.
“My vessel has been breached. Faint fragments of wills, or rather, what you would call fragments of souls, leaked out, and the wind has a strange custom of carrying them while it travels the land.”
“Vessel?” I couldn’t grasp what he meant. But he spoke of souls leaking… from this so-called vessel.
Was that something that monsters like him did? Not only kill, but consume souls as well?
The thought was terrifying, but I didn’t doubt him. Not after everything I had seen.
“You’re saying you both heard the dead?” Martin asked. Some of his skepticism was gone, replaced by something more unsettling. He seemed to have reached the same conclusion as me, and even many of the other chainrunners had begun paying attention to our conversation.
It wasn’t difficult in the silence of those frozen lands. Our voices were far louder than they should have been.
“Yes,” was all Omen replied.
“But the dead... don’t speak,” Tom said.
A faint smile appeared on Omen’s strangely calm face. “You’re mistaken. They are the ones who speak the most.”
Then he turned to me, and the smile was gone. “However, don’t give them ears, or else they may lay claim to your mind.”
And then he was gone. As if he had never been standing in front of us at all, and the whole exchange had been nothing more than an illusion.
The three of us stood in silence for a moment, staring at the space where he had been.
“So he’s truly crazy,” Tom said, though his voice lacked conviction.
Martin shook his head. “I’m not so sure. Strange, sure, but crazy...” He pondered for a moment. “Well, definitely crazy. But not the kind of crazy that means he’s wrong. Just... crazy.”
“I don’t think he’s crazy,” I said. “I just think he doesn’t see things as we do. Maybe ghosts are something he considers normal.”
***
Our rest was brief. After all, we still stood within the fog, far from any ward, and despite the heavy coats, we were still freezing.
Yet our ride through the fog became something I had not expected—it became quiet. Not only because the adrenaline had worn off, but simply because we were fighting no more.
There was also something more, a confidence that we would conclude our journey as long as Omen still stood.
Something about him had changed after the battle against the spiders. Or perhaps it hadn't changed at all, and we were simply seeing him clearly for the first time.
No... There was definitely something different. Maybe he had consumed too many souls from those beasts, and that was what made his presence so different.
We passed the rest of District 6 without sighting a single beast. The frozen land stretched on in every direction, featureless and white, and nothing stirred within it. No shadows moving through the fog. No distant growls. No skittering legs or clicking mandibles. Just snow, and silence, and the crunch of hooves on the compacted road Omen had cleared for us.
We only knew we had reached District 7 because Gustav somehow knew and announced it. I couldn’t tell how. The landscape hadn’t changed. There were no markers, no towers, no facilities.
Whatever had once separated the districts was buried or gone. All I saw was more snow, more fog, and the pale road stretching ahead until the haze swallowed it.
Nothing suggested anyone had ever lived here. Only the road beneath us and the white emptiness on either side.
The silence deepened as we rode. It pressed against us from all sides, so heavy and so complete that speaking felt almost sacrilegious, as if the land itself would punish us for breaking it. So few spoke. We kept our eyes on the road and our horses moving and tried not to think about how wrong it all felt.
By the time Gustav announced District 8, I had begun to doubt whether any progress was truly being made. The land looked the same. The fog looked the same. The snow stretched on without variation, and the road ahead disappeared into the haze at exactly the same distance, no matter how far we rode. It felt as if we had entered some strange, endless loop, covering ground that folded back on itself.
Gustav seemed sure we were moving forward, but I couldn’t tell how he knew. Probably Omen was the one telling him so.
Still, no beasts.
We did see some. Towering shapes loomed out of the fog from time to time, and the first sighting nearly sent the column into a panic. Weapons were drawn, horses pulled short, riders shouting warnings down the line. But the shapes didn’t move. As we drew closer, we saw why.
They had frozen. Mid-stride, mid-lunge, caught in whatever they had been doing when the cold took them. Their bodies were encased in thick layers of frost that had hardened into something closer to stone, and their eyes, still open, stared out at nothing.
Some had their jaws open, teeth bared, as if they had been roaring when the ice claimed them. Others were twisted in positions that suggested they had tried to flee.
They stood along the road like monuments to something terrible, and we rode past them in silence.
The fog had always been full of danger, and danger at least meant the world was still working the way it was supposed to. This emptiness felt unnatural. It felt like something fundamental had been removed from the land, and what remained was incomplete. Broken in a way that couldn’t be repaired.
From time to time, I also heard the whispers again.
They drifted through the wind, faint and formless, just beyond the edge of understanding. Occasionally, a word surfaced, clear enough to recognize but gone before I could hold on to it. Once, I thought I heard Harold again. Another time, a voice I didn’t recognize at all, speaking in a cadence that sounded almost like singing.
Omen had told me those belonged to souls that had breached his vessel, whatever that meant. Honestly, I couldn’t say whether the confirmation made me feel better for knowing I wasn’t losing my mind, or worse for knowing there were ghosts surrounding us, carried on the same wind that touched our skin.
It seemed nobody but Omen and I could hear them. A curse, he had called it, and he had warned me not to pay attention to it. So I tried to push the whispers from my thoughts, which was far harder than it should have been, considering how silent everything else was. In the absence of any other sound, the whispers became the loudest thing in the world.
I should have been worried when the beasts tracked our scent again, when they came back to us at District 9. Instead, I was relieved. Their return meant there was an ending to those frozen lands, that the world beyond them still existed and still followed the rules we knew.
We prepared to face them, but few reached us before freezing in place. The cold still lingered here, weaker than before but strong enough to slow them, and those that pushed through it moved sluggishly, their limbs stiff, their reactions dulled. They were easier to kill that way, though none of us took pleasure in it.
Omen, it seemed, saw little reason to hold back with us so close to our destination. The next ward should be only two districts away, and both District 9 and District 10 were not long districts, according to the old chainrunner reports.
The snow and ice ended at District 9, fading just a bit beyond its border. The ground beneath reappeared, cracked and barren but solid, and for the first time in what felt like days, I could see earth instead of white. It was good to know the cold had not reached District 11.
Those within the ward would be safe from it, though they would surely feel its touch. Crops would suffer. Harvests would thin. But they would live, and that was more than I could say for many of us.
Little happened during our passage through those two last districts. Rogara was up again, riding among us with that intensity of hers, her presence alone enough to keep the cold at bay for those closest to her. Gustav had settled by the time the beasts came at us again.
The bloodlust from Bloodreaver had faded from his eyes, and he fought with the calm, measured precision of a veteran rather than the frenzied brutality the artifact demanded of him. Cairen and Artemis had also had time to rest.
Artemis seemed happy to have a reason to move. She had passed the frozen districts shivering like the rest of us, and I think the cold bothered her more than any beast ever could.
She entered the frontline with something close to eagerness, grateful for the heat that battle put into the blood, and she cut through whatever managed to pass by Omen’s barrage of ice spears and the terrifying tentacles of ice that would rise from the ground without warning, seizing beasts by their legs and ripping them apart before they could even scream.
Nobody was surprised when we reached District 10 without casualties. Nor when the same repeated. The beasts that came were few and weak, and those that weren’t were handled by Omen before they ever reached the column. It was the strangest thing, riding through the fog and feeling something close to safe.
Even Omen finally showed signs of elation. It was subtle, barely more than a shift in his posture and a loosening of the tension he had carried, but it was there. He could see the end of this, and for the first time, so could we.
At last, we saw it.
The ward of District 11.
It appeared through the fog like a mirage, its outline shimmering and uncertain at first, then solidifying as we drew closer. The great barrier rose before us, and behind it, the faint promise of warmth, of shelter, of something other than fog and snow and death.
Chainrunners around me began to sit straighter in their saddles. Some whispered to one another. A few even smiled, though the smiles were fragile things, worn by faces too exhausted to hold them for long.
“Halt.”
Omen’s voice cut through it all. Not loud, but absolute. Enough to stop more than a hundred riders without needing to be repeated.
Our destination was so close we could almost touch it, yet Omen himself had told us to stop. To stop the run, even as beasts came our way from behind.
A murmur rippled through the lines. Confusion first, then something worse.
We were so close. We could see it. Why would he stop us now?
I looked at him then, searching for the confidence that had carried us through this land of monsters, the certainty that had made even Gustav defer to him without question.
It wasn’t there.
And in his face, I saw worry for the first time.