Chapter 13: The Edge of Reality

The night stretched endlessly.

Aedric could feel it pressing against his skin, the air thick and trembling as though reality itself had begun to fracture. The fire at their camp had burned low, little more than smoldering embers now, but no one dared sleep. Something was wrong.

The others felt it too. Rhea had abandoned her sharpening, her dagger resting forgotten on her lap. Osric, ever the sentinel, gripped the hilt of his sword but did not move. Elias sat with his back straight, fingers twitching as he rolled his silver coin between them.

Aedric stood.

He couldn't explain what he felt, only that something was pulling him forward. A force both familiar and unknowable, a whisper threading through his veins, urging him into the darkness beyond the fire's reach. His hand found the key in his pocket, the metal unnaturally warm against his skin.

"We shouldn't be here," Osric murmured, his voice unusually quiet.

Aedric barely heard him. His feet had already begun to move.

He stepped past the edge of the firelight. The night did not greet him as it should have—it swallowed him. The trees, the ground beneath his boots, even the sky seemed unreal, shifting like ink spilled on water. His breath hitched.

Then the world split open.

A soundless rupture, a wound torn through the fabric of existence. It did not reveal another place, but rather something beyond place—a void that was not empty.

And within it, something watched him back.

Aedric did not scream. He could not. The weight of the presence held him in place, suffocating, all-consuming. Shadows writhed within the tear in reality, whispering in voices that did not belong to any living thing.

You should not have come.

Behind him, Elias shouted his name. Hands grabbed at his shoulders, pulling him back. The moment they touched him, the world lurched, snapping back into its rightful shape.

Aedric staggered, breath ragged. The night was normal again. The trees were still. The fire crackled in the distance.

But something had changed.

The others were staring at him, their faces pale, their expressions tight with something dangerously close to fear.

"What did you see?" Rhea asked, her voice hushed.

Aedric swallowed hard, his fingers still curled around the key. He knew the truth now.

The cycle was breaking.

And something was waiting on the other side.

......................................

Sleep did not come that night. The group sat around the fire in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Rhea kept her dagger unsheathed, tracing the edge with slow, deliberate motions. Osric kept his back to the flames, eyes locked on the darkness beyond. Elias, for the first time since Aedric had known him, looked shaken.

Aedric stared into the embers, the glow burning itself into his retinas. His fingers twitched, still remembering the heat of the key in his palm, the feeling of that thing looking back at him.

"What did you feel?" Elias finally asked, breaking the silence.

Aedric hesitated. He wasn't sure how to describe it. The sheer wrongness of it all. The sense that he had stepped too far, glimpsed something not meant to be seen. He settled for the only words that came to mind.

"It knew me."

The air grew heavier. Osric shifted, his grip tightening around his sword. Rhea stopped running her blade over the whetstone.

Elias nodded slowly, like he had expected that answer. "Then we don't have much time."

Aedric exhaled sharply, frustration creeping into his voice. "You keep saying that, but time for what? What's coming?"

Elias's gaze darkened. "The breaking point."

A gust of wind stirred the flames, sending a spray of embers into the night. The temperature seemed to drop, and a sound—faint, distant—whispered through the trees.

Aedric turned his head sharply. That voice—

It was calling his name.

You should not have come.

But this time, it was not from the void.

It was from the forest.