Chapter 23: Silence
Chapter 23: Silence
Running at full speed, the imp tore across the rottenness landscape of the Maw. Even on two legs, he was a blur, his steps ripping long scars through the flesh fields beneath him. He'd stashed his blades a while back. He didn't need them right now. Between his senses and the system's, he'd have plenty of time to summon them if anything got too close.
For now, he just wanted to enjoy his new speed.
'Wonder if I could outrun that Alpha?'
[Negative–]
"That's enough!"
He launched over a wide chasm filled with acidic runoff, teeth grit.
"No more! Stop listening to my thoughts!"
[Unable to grant User request.]
"Why not?!"
His pace didn't slow as the jagged white tips of the boneyards were just coming into view on the horizon.
[System is bonded with the User. User's neural pathways are integrated within all system functions.]
"I'm never gonna get used to that. Can you at least pretend you can?"
He waited. No answer. He was almost at the edge of the boneyards when the system finally responded.
[Request granted.]
Victory. It wasn't much, but it was something. Maybe one day he'd find a way to shield his thoughts for real. For now, pretending would have to do.
Leaping from tumor to tumor, the imp skidded to a halt atop a set of inflating lungs.
"How much farther from here?"
[At current pace: one day of travel, if sustained.]
So far, nothing had slowed him down. A few hounds, but nothing worth stopping for. He figured it made sense, this far out, only the Corpse Worms were known to linger near the boneyards.
Tail flicking, he ripped a chunk from the swollen lung beneath him, he bit into it and kept moving. The ground slowly began to change. The soft, shifting give of the flesh fields gave way to hardened layers. Dry, cracked meat turned to ash beneath his feet as he ran.
He was in it now...the Boneyards of the Maw. Where what cannot rot hardens in stillness. And what won't break down waits to be devoured. The quiet hit him hardest, no churn, no pulse. Just lifeless.
A shiver crawled up his spine. His entire existence had played out inside the moving, the screaming and bleeding of the flesh fields. But this… this was dead. Stagnant and waiting. His chest tightened. His steps felt off.
"System? Anything out here besides Corpse Worms I should worry about?"
[Affirmative.]
He stumbled mid-stride when the system failed to explain further.
"Wanna tell me what they are?"
[Affirmative. Bone is the most persistent material within the Maw. It holds the highest probability of accumulating residual soul integrity. This can result in the spontaneous creation of sentient entities, commonly known as Bone Wraiths. Another variant includes the Skull Titans.]
Neither name helped as his imagination ran wild. Limited as it was. He'd only fought scraps of the Maw so far, things with skin and meat. Things that screamed. But things that didn't bleed?
He swallowed hard and kept running.
He almost didn't want to ask. His speed dipped, stride shortening. His approach was changing, bones no longer shattered underfoot. Each step landed quieter than the last.
"Anything else?"
[Affirmative. Warlords.]
The word hit hard as his mind scrambled to piece together meaning. He came up short, only vague implications, half-formed ideas.
[Warlords are fallen demons from the lower layers of Hell. True demons, born with a True-Name.]
He staggered for a second, realization hitting hard.
"That's who owns the place I'm heading to, isn't it? A warlord."
[Probability is high.]
Charon's reputation in his mind plummeted. What kind of lunatic sent an imp to challenge a warlord? Still... he had no choice. He picked up speed again, bounding from bone to bone.
"Why would a True Demon want to be here?"
[They wouldn't. Warlords are either banished or in hiding. The Maw has no ruler. No demon is able to gain true authority over it, so no demon has any desire for it.]
"So the gate's its way out. Some warlord trying to escape."
[Likelihood is high.]
His jaw clenched. The more he thought about it, the worse it got.
"How strong are they?"
[Unknown. Warlords vary in rank.]
Perfect, more unknowns and more guesswork. He shut up after that, shifting focus back to his surroundings. He'd think about the rest later. For now, he needed to watch his step.
He leapt rib to rib, bounding across the bleached remains of some long-dead giant, when a sound hit him. Low at first. A hum, deep and distant. The sound came in pulses. It lasted only seconds at a time before cutting off, then returning moments later.
He didn't notice the vibration accompanying it until he stopped moving. Faint at first… but growing. Scanning the Boneyards, he found nothing in sight, but then he looked farther... up and out.
His jaw dropped.
"What is that?!"
[Skull Titan. Estimated threat level: A-Rank.]
His thick, dark red skin paled. Sweat rolled as he dropped to all fours, pressing himself low against the bone.
Unstoppable. That was the only word that made sense.
Thousands of feet tall, the Skull Titan moved with an unnatural weight, each step pounding the Boneyards like a siege engine of the damned. Its limbs were long and skeletal, more like stilts than legs, bony towers stretched thin and unnatural, as if cobbled together from the remains of a hundred dead giants. Every joint bent wrong, every limb dragged with the eerie grace of something too old to care about physics.
Its torso was a nest of jutting ribs and rotten marrow, strung with cords of decayed sinew. Where organs should have been, clusters of twitching nerves and sloshing rot pulsed like tumors. Bone scraped bone as it moved. Its weight cracked the hardened landscape, shaking ash loose from long-dead fossils buried just beneath.
Then there was the head. Wide, hollow, and grinning. A grotesque mockery of a skull, its jawbone stretched nearly the width of its body, lined with rows of mismatched teeth—human, demon, animal, some even fused sideways or stacked two rows deep. Eyes like bottomless pits stared without focus, but its hunger was directed. Purposeful.
It stopped.
The jaw dropped.
With a sudden, wet crunch, the Titan slammed its face into a wide stretch of bone field, grinding everything in its path into pulp. Ribcages, skulls, buried refuse. It chewed like it enjoyed it. A noise rose from its throat, guttural and echoing, a warped blend of crunching calcium and something that sounded almost like laughter.
Then it moved on. Slow. Deliberate. Each time its head lowered, the Maw lost more of itself. It wasn't killing to eat, it was eating to erase.
As the imp's initial panic faded, once he was sure the titan wasn't heading his way, he noticed something worse. The Skull Titan wasn't alone. Orbiting its mountainous frame were hundreds of what he presumed to be Bone Wraiths, drifting and circling like flies on a corpse too massive to rot.
Their wings didn't flap. They didn't scream. They just hovered. Slow, deliberate shapes drifting through the burning haze. Bones etched black like they'd been smelted in something unnatural.
Each one bore a weapon. Long axes with serrated vertebrae for blades. Spears formed from splintered spines. Clubs, jagged and cruel, fashioned from femurs lashed to jaws. None of them matched, but they all looked used. Fresh cracks, caked gore, missing teeth.
And inside each skeletal form… a core of flame. Not orange. Not red. But gray. A churning, muted fire that didn't glow. It pulsed. It breathed. And it reeked of something the imp couldn't name, only feel.
It wasn't rage, it wasn't hatred, it was colder, emptier. The imp stared, and for the first time in a long while, he didn't feel hunger or anger. Just a quiet disgust, rising like vomit.
Even from this distance, he could feel it. Whatever those things were, whatever burned inside them, it wasn't fire. It was void made real. Rot turned conscious.
And they were watching over the Titan like guardians of something ancient, circling its limbs and spine, waiting for any threat that might try its luck.
He blinked, realizing his claws had dug halfway into the bone beneath him. His body had gone still. His breathing, quiet.
He couldn't look away.
"Bone Wraiths?"
[Affirmative.]
He couldn't even begin to imagine fighting that thing, let alone the swarm guarding it like flies. Whatever confidence he'd felt earlier was gone. Stripped. The Maw had reminded him of its place. Of his place.
The tremors faded. The vibrations had dulled. But the image of the Skull Titan still marched behind his eyes, burning there like a scar. He watched it shrink into the distance, and only when it disappeared over the horizon did he let himself breathe.
"Are they all like that?"
[Negative. Skull Titan size and strength vary depending on age.]
He welcomed the answer. Quiet relief, just enough to force his legs to move again. At least the Maw wasn't crawling with those things.
After another stretch of running, he slowed, his route curving toward an enormous trench. The massive, sunken scar in the earth, carved clean by the Titan's passing.
Standing at its edge, he stared down, his tail twitching.
"This is insane... all this, just from its mouth."
The ground below was annihilated. A sea of slag and blackened bone, smoking and pitted with molten veins. Everything had melted. Everything had been unmade. The heat was thick in the air, but it didn't stop him. He skidded down the edge and stepped into the ruin.
Instantly, his eyes began to burn. His nose twisted. The stink of vaporized ash and bone had hit like a fist. He staggered, wiping at his face, blinking furiously.
Suddenly, he smelled something beneath the filth, hidden in the sulfur and soot. Faint. Something that didn't belong.
"Strange..."
He tilted his head, nostrils flaring, sniffing again. The smell danced, slipping around the smoke, clean and sharp like a shift of wind not belonging to this world.
"Never smelled anything like this..."
It attracted.
His pupils shrank. He didn't blink, didn't think. A sudden, intoxicated calm descended over him. The system began to blare something behind his eyes, panels lighting up in crimson flashes...ignored. His claws barely felt the scorched dirt as he moved, following that phantom scent, absentmindedly crawling over slag and ruin like a mindless zombie.
His breath came slow. Drool leaked from his teeth. His heart barely beat against his ribs. And then he saw it. Tucked in a nest of soot-black bone, untouched by fire or ash.
A single stalk.
A flower, pale and blooming.
Alive.
His sudden calm snapped, something inside his chest had cracked wide, his thoughts erupting, drowning the previous silence in horrible, undeniable want.
A flower in Hell.
It was everything to him now.