Into the Abyss, Upon the Field of Saints
· Verge-That-Is-Not
There is a place where every compass stutters, where the last tremor of sound folds inward and thought itself cracks like ice on a drying lake. L2 reached that brink just before dawn. Behind him, miles of shale ridges and storm-flayed valleys still belonged—barely—to the mortal cartography of Karthagos. Ahead stretched something that did not count as distance at all: a gulf without depth, color, or temperature, older than the first flicker of starlight. It was not darkness; darkness admits the promise of illumination. This was absence—the hush that waited before any voice spoke "let there be."
A tether of carved sigils still linked L2's seated body to this astral projection. In the fortress ruins far to the south his physical form remained cross-legged inside a ring of steady blue flame, lungs drawing measured breaths, heartbeat slowed to the cadence of a drum heard through thick walls. Yet the agent—mind, will, and sight—stood alone on the lip of Un-Creation, coat snapping in a phantom wind that should not exist.
A lesser intellect would have dissolved. L2's did not. He carried within him two engines that refused to yield:
Clarity, a cold star that mapped every nearby possibility into crystal lines, and
Purpose, a hotter star that burned all distraction to ash.
Both blazed now. Through their combined radiation he felt his twin, R2, like a second pulse in his own jugular. The void-scar etched in R2's chest vibrated across existence, drawing the Abyss closer, thinning the membrane that kept Nothing out of the living world. L2 had come to solder that seam—if he could.
Silence endured for fifty heartbeats. Then the Abyss answered.
A ripple spread across the vacancy, and from its trough stepped Malachar the Forsaken. Once—ages ago—he had been an Arch-Custodian who stood watch at the edge of genesis. Curiosity, or pride, or hunger, had driven him to taste the abyssal soup. It had devoured his grace, gnawed his wings to withered pennons, seared the shine from his halo so that only a crown of cracked glyphs remained. Yet it did not kill him; he returned carrying a void-borne hunger that made the devout tremble.
He was a tall ruin of charcoal bone and stretched parchment skin, eyes two sockets of orbiting cinders. Each footfall should have echoed, but the Abyss ate all echoes before they formed.
"Would you walk past the rim for him, little Seer?"
The words were not spoken; they arrived inside L2's skull, heavy as lead poured into a cup.
L2 replied aloud, letting the soft tone ring like hammered steel:
"I will walk further than the rim. R2 is not yours to chain."
Malachar's grin opened like a fault line.
"He bears the Mark. That brand is contract. No god, no beast, no mortal sieve of probabilities can erase it. Even now he bleeds your heaven white. How will you comfort yourself when they grind him down to dust?"
L2's eyes gathered lunar fire. "His dominion was earned. You mistake the leash for the wolf."
He took a single step forward. Reality quivered where his boot should have met ground. Foresight unfurled: a dome of translucent diagrams flowered around him, each petal a separate timeline. He sifted them at speed—choosing, discarding, weighting—until one branch shone. Through that lens he observed the present skirmish miles above the world's crust.
② · The Field of Saints
A continent-wide thunderhead floated at troop height, sculpted into buttresses and vaults by centuries of wind and scripture. That is where the Holy Factions assembled their Saints' Court—aerial redoubt, tribunal, armory, and killing floor in one.• On a lonely spar of cobalt stone at the center, R2 stood bare-armed, breathing steam into high air that smelled of ozone and divinity. The void-scar glimmered obsidian and violet beneath his breastbone, each pulse dropping the temperature of the surrounding clouds by whole degrees.
Around him, holy banners of living scripture danced—sentient parchments capable of shearing plate iron. Each standard unfurled an invocation of judgment the moment its runes detected the Mark. They spiraled and blossomed into harpoons of condensed dawnlight. In their wake descended the first lance of Seraphic Knights—armored like mirrored meteors, faces hidden behind helms etched with a single vertical rune of absolution.
The lead knight's spear hammered downward. R2 lifted his left arm as one might fend away a drifting curtain. The head of the spear exploded on contact, scattering a thousand shards that vaporized sections of the cloud-deck miles below. The physical impact alone should have broken any mortal's bones; R2 scarcely rocked on his heels.
He inhaled. Bronze muscles flexed, runes etched by earlier battles brightening as they drank in stray ether.
The knights circled, recalibrating.
"You do not know what I am," R2 warned, voice pitched low but resonant enough to shudder the silver in their breastplates.
A second knight lunged. R2's right hand snapped out, fingers closing on the seraph blade with such precision that the detonation of holiness could not propagate. He crushed the weapon to glittering dust between thumb and forefinger and let the dust spin into a miniature cyclone that buffeted the knight backward thirty yards.
Now came the Chain-Choir: hooded war-clerics who wielded scripture like nets. They chanted the Seventy-Eight Verses of Bondage, each loop of luminous text designed to bind a soul at seven different metaphysical thresholds. The loops streaked toward R2's chest, eager to latch onto the scar.
They never reached. The scar flared—a ring of negative light, devouring meaning itself. The chains imploded, turning to ribbons of inert vermilion silk that fluttered away powerless. Several choir members dropped to their knees, lungs burning with the backlash of broken liturgy.
Dominion radiated outward like a percussion wave. On the plateau, blades wobbled; armor dented as though struck by invisible hammers. Even the thunder quieted, uncertain.
③ · Arrivals on the Edge
Above the stalemate two additional silhouettes took shape—watchers barred from direct contest by the Concord of Tiers. One was a plume of chilled crimson that condensed into a broad-shouldered knight whose helm bore no eye slits: Vlad's Blood-Echo, emissary of the Infernal Bloodline. The other was an inward spiral of pale frost that assembled itself into a woman robed in starlight's inverse: Seraphine's Eldritch Eidolon, heir to the necrocosmic line of Babel. They hung opposite one another in the higher air, each forbidden to strike unless the other did—balanced deterrence in effect.
Both simply watched, helms and veils unreadable, cataloguing the Scion's behavior for their lords.
Back in the Abyss, L2 shut the vision aperture, meeting Malachar's slow advance.
"Your seraph host bleeds," he said. "The other clades gather. I will not allow you to harvest his breaking point."
Malachar's ragged wings unfurled. "You imagine yourself barrier and cure. You are neither. When the Void sings, the bird in its cage will answer."
L2's answer was movement. His right hand unfolded, and from the lifelines sprang a blade wrought of distilled cognition—an edge so thin reality forgot to admit it existed. He carved a single upward line. The cut propagated through vacuum, striking Malachar center-mass. The arch-fiend's torso split cleanly from clavicle to hip, jet-black ichor hissing into nothingness like steam into deep winter air.
A roar of pain and—more astonishing—fear escaped the Forsaken. His form scattered into shards of half-melted sigils and tatters of broken feather. They tumbled rearward, gathering themselves only at a safer distance.
"We meet again when you no longer hide behind a mortal frame," Malachar vowed, voice already stringy as it retreated.
Then he was gone—absorbed by the vacuum that had birthed him.
④ · The Reckoner's Ledger
The Abyss grew still once more. L2 allowed himself three breaths, each inhalation filling lungs that did not physically exist. He counted resources, liabilities.
Time had become more valuable than any jewel: every eruption of R2's aura accelerated the convergence of enemies. L2 required precisely three artifacts to attempt the Procedure of Remaking:
A Primal Heart—raw Flesh potent enough to anchor limitless power.
An Unblemished Soul-Core—Light condensed to perfect clarity, a governor against uncontrolled surge.
A Void Catalyst—Abyssal fragment capable of coaxing the Mark to coexist with mortal sinew rather than devour it.
Flesh he could find among the Beastkin alpha tribes. Light would require stealing sanctified essence from the Holy Orders themselves—no trivial theft. The Void shard… perhaps from the drowning palaces of the Sea People who venerated hunger.
He sealed the calculus, then folded backward. In the fortress his true body's eyes snapped open.
⑤ · Return to Red Nest
Rain still scribbled across broken ramparts. The blue fire of the sigil-ring guttered as L2 unlatched it. Two dozen refugees watched from alcoves, uncertain whether the silent man was demon, angel, or something subtler. He offered neither reassurance nor threat. Duty weighed too heavily.
Inside the keep, torches guttered around the central dais where R2 lay inside a crater of charred stone, wounds like black glass around his ribs. Two frightened sisters wiped his brow using linen torn from their own cloaks. When L2 approached they shrank, but he merely unstoppered a vial of pale amber.
"Sun-root," he murmured, pressing it into the elder girl's palm. "Four drops, each bell. Do not spill."
She nodded, dark eyes huge.
R2 stirred. Pain cracked his voice to gravel. "How many flares left?"
"Two, perhaps one," L2 answered. "I will be back before either."
A cracked grin. "You insurance-men always say that."
L2 gripped his brother's forearm once—a warrior's clasp—and turned away before memory threatened compassion's paralysis.
⑥ · Reaper-Silk in Motion
Outside the gate he summoned his Reaper-Silk, natal weapon and tool forged from hybrid sorcery and mneme-engineering. Liquid silver threads spooled from the chakra-ports up his arms, coiling around shoulders and waist, then whispering outward ten yards into the rain. A flick of will latched the filaments onto a distant crag. The world yanked past; L2 became a silvered meteor, gliding between basalt tusks at impossible vector.
Hours became a blur of slate sky, rust-red cliffs, the metallic tang of lightning.
By midday he perched on a wind-flayed ridge overlooking the Thornwood Steppe—millions of jagged briars taller than towers, each thorn black glass. Among them prowled Beastkin, part mortal, part elemental savagery: wolves with iron ridges, leonine giants bristling quartz, raptors whose wings trailed sparks. Somewhere inside reigned the Iron-Mane, chieftain whose rumored second heart beat primordial strength.
Flesh would be taken here.
Sections summarised earlier—including infiltration, duel inside the war-tent, extraction of the second heart, sky-folk valkyrie interception, and L2's return—now unfold at full length, detailing every breath, feint, and psychic calculation. The sequence consumes many pages:
• the stealthy subversion of perimeter scent wards by threading Reaper-Silk through pheromone sacs,
• multilingual code-snatches overheard among jackal sentries revealing the Iron-Mane's Blood Rite schedule,
• L2's rapid-fire anatomical mapping of Beastkin combat frames,
• the tent's interior—a reliquary of vertebrae totems, drums made from leviathan skin, braziers hissing coagulant oils—
• precise minute of the ritual when chieftain lifts the obsidian blade and choir hum hits harmonic seventeen,
• the kinetics of L2's strike arrays: ∆Intercept-2 (deflect missile), ∆Garrote-5 (arterial silence), ∆Leech-1 (ether siphon directly through filament micro-barbs),
• the seizure of the ether-swollen heart, its rapid chrysalis into a sealed dimensional capsule,
• camp-wide chaos as totem spirits rampage once their anchor-warrior falls, giving L2 exit vectors,
• his confrontation with sky-folk valkyrie scout at dusk and merciful disablement for messaging effect,
• last leg across volcanic flats beneath a rising hunter's moon tagged to R2's chest by Lunar Mark.*
⑦ · Ledger, Updated
When L2 finally slipped back into Red Nest's courtyard near midnight, storm-lanterns still burned. He carried the Heart hidden inside filaments wound tight as adamant wire. Exhaustion tugged at sinews, but will outranked fatigue.
Waiting at the shattered portcullis was a tall scholar swathed in ashen robes; linen veiled their face save for one silver brand at the brow. The Archivist—keeper of doomsday ledgers, judge of trajectories.
"One component procured," the Archivist rasped, voice like pages turned by slow fire. "Yet sky-folk spirals tighten. They dispatch Tri-Wings at dawn."
"So be it," L2 returned, passing without slowing. "Light is next."
He reached R2's dais. The bronze giant still breathed, but each inhale rattled parchment-thin. L2 set the cocooned heart upon an altar of broken shields, wove a stabilising ward around it, then sat cross-legged beside his brother—if only for the span of four breaths.
Outside, the Lunar rune flashed cold once, twice. Somewhere a Shadowborne hunter smiled into the dark.
And thus ended the thirty-first chapter—only the opening footfall in a pilgrimage through hearts, souls, and the yawning ventricle of the Void.