The chamber had grown colder.
It wasn’t the torches, Nysha had extinguished them hours ago, leaving the underground hall in near-total darkness. The only glow came from the thin sheen of mana coiling around her fingertips and the faint, sinister hum of Zerathis. Shadows stretched across the cracked stone floor like pools of black water, bending unnaturally toward the cursed blade in Lindarion’s grasp.
Nysha stood with her arms folded, her voice even, patient. "You’ve hidden. You’ve erased. Now you’ll walk."
Lindarion’s eyes narrowed. "Walk where?"
"Through," she said simply.
He tilted his head, suspicion flickering in his gaze. "You mean teleportation."
"No," Nysha corrected, her red eyes glowing faintly in the dark. "You won’t jump through space. You’ll let the shadows swallow you, then spit you back out somewhere else. It is faster than running, slower than true space-folding. It leaves you vulnerable if you fail. And—" she hesitated, voice dropping lower, "—most who try don’t come back whole."
Ashwing, curled on a cracked pillar in his lizard form, hissed softly at those words. His tongue flicked once toward Lindarion, as though warning him.
But Lindarion only grinned. His grin was tired, bloodied at the edges from sleepless days and endless failures, but it was real. "Then it’s perfect."
He crouched in the center of the chamber, Zerathis
He focused, heart hammering. The shadows obeyed now, not perfectly, but enough. They wrapped around him like smoke, eager but unstable. He whispered his will into them: take me there.
The far side of the chamber. Twenty paces. That was all.
The shadows surged up, swallowing his legs, his torso, his arms. Cold enveloped him, biting deeper than ice. His breath hitched as sound vanished, replaced by the hollow silence of the void. His grip on Zerathis tightened until his knuckles turned white.
The darkness rejected him.
It spat him back out with violent force, slamming him onto the stone floor a few feet from where he had started. His body convulsed, muscles screaming, lungs clawing for air.
Nysha’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears. "You pushed. You ordered. You still don’t understand."
He spat blood onto the stone and forced himself up on shaking arms. His eyes burned with fury. "Then tell me how."
She shook her head. "I can’t. I can only show you where the cliff is. You’re the one who has to fall."
His lips curled in a feral smile. "Then I’ll fall until I break through the bottom."
Again and again, Lindarion let the shadows consume him, and again and again they spat him back out like spoiled meat. Sometimes he fell to his knees, gasping for air. Sometimes the backlash hurled him against the walls so hard his ribs cracked. Once, the shadows tried to hold him, half inside, half out, and for a breathless instant he felt his flesh stretching thin, his bones splintering across a thousand angles of reality.
He screamed that time.
Ashwing leapt down from his perch, hissing violently, his little claws scratching Nysha’s arm as if demanding she stop him.
But Nysha’s jaw stayed firm. She didn’t intervene. She only whispered, so quietly it was nearly lost in the echoes: "If he stops now, he’ll never survive them."
Them. The Saints. The Nobles. The ones waiting outside this pit.
Ashwing quieted then, though his black eyes never left Lindarion.
It happened on the twelfth attempt.
Lindarion’s body trembled from overuse, his vision swimming with red. His hands shook on Zerathis, blood dripping from his nose onto the hilt. He felt every fiber of himself screaming to stop.
He simply... stepped.
The shadows rose again, but this time he didn’t resist. He didn’t tell them where to go, or how fast, or what distance. He let them take him. He let himself fall.
The cold swallowed him whole, biting into his veins. For a heartbeat, he thought he had failed again. He felt his breath vanish, his body dissolve. He felt nothing.
He was standing on the far side of the chamber.
His chest heaved. His eyes darted around wildly. The air was colder here, though no space separated it from where he’d been a heartbeat ago.
Nysha’s eyes widened.
Ashwing hissed softly, not mockery this time, but awe.
Lindarion laughed, ragged and sharp. "Ha... ha! Did you see that?"
Nysha’s lips pressed into the faintest smile. "Yes. You fell."
The next tries were messy, sometimes the shadows spit him back half-way, sometimes they threw him sideways into walls. Once, they dropped him upside-down against the ceiling and he fell hard enough to rattle his skull.
But the path was open now.
With each attempt, he grew steadier. The shadows became less hostile, more familiar. He learned to nudge instead of order. He learned to trust them instead of breaking them.
By the end of the night, he could cross the chamber in three steps, each swallowed and spat back out in utter silence.
Nysha watched with folded arms, expression unreadable.
When he finally collapsed against the wall, drenched in sweat, his chest heaving, he grinned at her. "Sword Saint won’t even see me coming."
Her eyes hardened. "He’ll see you. He always will. But maybe..." She tilted her head, red eyes narrowing. "Maybe he won’t see you soon enough."
Ashwing slithered up onto his shoulder, curling against his neck. The little dragon licked at the blood on his collarbone with a faint hiss, as though sealing the pact.
The chamber was no longer enough.
Lindarion could feel it in his veins, the way the shadows strained against him whenever he tried again. The little tricks, crossing the hall, slipping a few steps ahead, weren’t enough. Every time he emerged on the far side, chest heaving, the hunger in him grew worse.