Ch 438: Inheritance of the Lost

Kalem stirred, the weight of dried blood crusting on his skin pulling him back into consciousness. His breath came ragged, each inhalation tasting like rust and ash. He blinked against the low, flickering glow of his fire sword — still faintly burning where it lay jammed into the earth beside him.

The ground around him was soaked in blood. Most of it not his.

Bodies sprawled at unnatural angles. Mangled things, humanoid once — maybe. Twisted by the Abyss, their bones bent wrong, flesh torn as if by claws far too large to belong to any natural predator. A ribcage jutted from one, shattered like porcelain. Another had no face left at all, just a melted smear of skin and ruined bone.

Kalem sat up slowly, groaning at the bruised weight in his limbs.

"Again," he muttered, voice hoarse. "This is the fourth time."

"You woke where you ended." "You always return to slaughter." "You are the weapon."

The voices were less mocking today. Still fractured, still wrong, but some laced with something almost like… regret.

Or was that just his own reflection echoing back?

Kalem clenched his jaw. These blackouts were getting longer. Deeper. Each time he came to, it was the same: piles of corpses, a trail of ruined ground, and one of his weapons in hand. No memory of the fights. No idea where he'd gone. Just aftermath.

He stood, blood flaking from his armor in crusted flakes. His fingers curled instinctively around the haft of the fire sword, then paused.

Where was the rest of his gear?

His head whipped around. No crate. No maul. No lance. Only Breakhowl.

Kalem spotted the familiar silhouette of the axe a dozen paces away, embedded in the cracked stone like it had been thrown with impossible force. He approached, wrenched it free with a grunt, and shouldered it over his back.

"Why did it have to be Breakhowl of all things?" he muttered. The great axe hummed faintly, mana coiled in its core. A single swing could shatter a wall. A full cleave could split stone with the force of a cannon.

His concern wasn't the weight. It was what it meant that his unconscious self had chosen this weapon. Breakhowl was never subtle. Never used in restraint.

He had wanted destruction, even if he couldn't remember it.

As he made his way across the warped path back toward the gate, Kalem's boots scraped over terrain half-swallowed by the Abyss. The air thickened again, warping like stretched fabric. Heat shimmered off invisible waves, and once again, the ground beneath him pulsed like a slowed heartbeat.

But something new had begun surfacing.

Scattered across the path were fragments — scraps of armor, broken hilts, cracked visors. Ancient rune-stones sunk halfway into the ground, glowing with faint, pulsing light. Most were unreadable, their glyphs worn down to nonsense — but the mana inside them still clung to existence like dying stars.

Kalem paused by one and touched it lightly.

A flicker — a flash of memory not his own. Screaming. Cold iron. A barrier made of light shattering like glass. Then, darkness.

He pulled his hand back. "Memory stones," he said aloud. "Faint… but still echoing."

He continued forward, more cautiously now.

This wasn't just battlefield detritus. This had once been a road. A pilgrimage of sorts. The marks on the stones and metal didn't scream battle, but purpose. There were repeated patterns of attempt — different generations of travelers, some clearly human, others not.

Not all of them came to conquer the Abyss.

Some had come to learn.

Some had come to kneel.

Kalem spotted something buried in a crook of stone: a metal-bound journal, caked in grime. He knelt beside it, brushing off layers of dust and blood. Most of the pages were torn, soaked, or burnt beyond saving.

But one phrase remained, written in tight, etched script — almost carved into the paper.

You do not open the gate. The gate opens you.

Kalem stared at the words.

"…Cryptic."

"No. True." "Very true." "Too late to stop now."

Kalem didn't argue with them. For once, they weren't wrong.

He stood again, flipping the journal shut and tucking it into his belt. The weight of it pressed into his side like a reminder.

"Seems like there were more than me," he said aloud, eyes scanning the darkness. "More that came before. Thought they could survive. Thought they could master this place."

"Always more." "Always less." "Always end the same."

Kalem stopped. His gaze landed on something larger nestled among the ruins — a skeletal figure, wrapped in ancient furs, fused to what looked like a rusted throne of weapons. A banner fluttered beside it, depicting a sigil half-forgotten to time — a rising eye inside a jagged sun.

He recognized it. Vaguely.

A knight order that vanished over a century ago. The Order of Dawnbreakers. Hunters of forbidden knowledge. Devourers of heresy. Gone in a single expedition into a forbidden zone the Council had redacted from all records.

This must have been it.

Kalem walked closer and knelt before the skeleton. A long, thin dagger rested in the corpse's lap, runes etched along the edge.

He didn't take the dagger.

But he bowed his head, just slightly.

"I'm not here to follow you," he whispered. "I'm here to finish it."

The wind shifted again, pulling through the ruins like a whisper through a tomb.

Behind him, the pulsing heartbeat of the gate resumed — slow, steady, like a massive thing waking from slumber.

Kalem turned back toward it, Breakhowl in hand.

His path was clearer now.

He would not simply survive.

He would learn from the inheritance left by the lost.

He would become what the gate feared most.

A will unbroken.