Zac stood up. The pain in his temple was gone, erased by the colder, more pervasive memory of his own healing. The Shroud, weighing on his shoulders, was no longer a mere prison, but a piece of the puzzle, a twisted key to his damnation.
'The game has rules. If I can learn them... then maybe I can survive.'
The determination that animated him had nothing heroic about it. It was the cold resolve of a condemned man who, cornered, decided to study the patterns of his cell. He cast one last look at the Waterfall of Night, his Tears of Regret balance at zero, then turned. Hope, that chimera, was a faint glimmer in the tunnel, a trap he couldn't ignore. He left the cave.
He emerged into a cavern of overwhelming immensity, so vast that its walls were lost in unfathomable darkness, a nothingness that seemed to absorb light and sound. The ground was a carpet of fine, cold black ash, mixed with broken rocks. The silence was total, but it wasn't a soothing silence. It was an oppressive, heavy silence, as if the whole world held its breath, a silence before the Apocalypse.
Zac moved forward. One step after another. The crunch of ash under his boots was the only sound in this immensity. 'Learn. Survive.' Each word was a fragile anchor in the drift of his sanity.
After what felt like an hour, or an eternity—time had no meaning in these abysses—he perceived it. Not a sound, but an absence. A low-frequency vibration, so deep he didn't hear it with his ears, but felt it in his ribcage, in his bones, a vibration that seemed to emanate from the stone itself, a primordial pulsation.
The air before him began to undulate. Like a heat haze distorting the distance over a burning desert, but there was no heat here. It was reality itself trembling, distorting, the contours of space blurring.
'What... A bug? A glitch in the system?'
He approached, wary, his body seized with nausea and dizziness. The humming intensified, Zac's body resonating like a soundboard. The distant walls of the cavern seemed to twist, their angles becoming impossible, defying Euclidean geometry, folding in on themselves into shapes that shouldn't have existed.
He understood then, with a chilling terror that vibrated every fiber of his being. This wasn't a bug. It was the presence of something. An entity so ancient and vast that it distorted space by its mere existence, a monster born before the stars. A forgotten thing, slumbering in the very foundations of the depths of Mordor, long before Sauron cast his shadow there. It was there, alive, and he was within its sphere of influence.
The Shroud on his back began to vibrate in sympathy with the humming, acting as a spiritual antenna. Whispers crept into his mind. They weren't words, not even a language. They were raw concepts, antediluvian ideas, frequencies that had no place in a human brain. A chorus of guttural sounds, impossible clicks, whistles from beyond the constellations.
'I see... dying stars... collapsing galaxies... time flowing backward... No... stop...'
He covered his ears with his hands, but the voices were already in his head, weaving a web of cosmic horror. The presence showed him visions. Not of his life, his failures. Worse. It showed him the abyssal immensity of the cosmos, the birth and death of suns, eternities flowing by in an instant. Infinite cycles of creation and annihilation.
'I am... nothing.' The realization tore away the little strength he had left. 'My life, my death, my suffering... it's less than a speck of dust in an infinite sandstorm. It has no importance. No meaning.'
Hope, that fragile sprout born in the cave, crumbled, gnawed away by this revelation of absolute insignificance. His determination dissolved like a shadow in a blaze. What was the point of fighting? What was the point of surviving in a universe that didn't even notice his agony?
He fell to his knees, his mind broken by the overwhelming weight of cosmic horror. The humming was now deafening, a vibration that threatened to reduce his soul to dust. The reality around him tore apart, not like fabric, but like breaking glass, a wrenching crack of space-time.
The ground before him opened, not to reveal a chasm, but a black void, a tear in the very fabric of the world. He looked into this abyss. There was nothing. Just oblivion. The end of pain. The end of meaning. The end of everything.
After a long, very long agony, his mind emptied of all will, Zac stood up. There was no longer fear in his eyes. No more rage. Just an empty, total acceptance.
He walked to the edge of the tear.
And he took a step forward.
His fall was slow, interminable. He fell through the unfathomable darkness, the whispers of nameless things accompanying him in his descent, whispering unutterable truths. He saw his life again, his failures, his hopes, but everything was devoid of color, emotion, substance. Unimportant facts. He was overcome by a despair so pure and total that it became a form of peace. The peace of abandonment.
Then, the contact. Annihilation.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
Zac woke up screaming. A primal cry, that of a mad and broken man, a trapped animal whose mind had just been flayed alive. He was on his knees, his hands on his head, his body shaking with spasms, still captive to the last unspeakable horrors.
He was back. At the starting point.
After long minutes, the screams turned into hoarse sobs, tearless cries that scraped his throat. He dragged himself to the waterfall. His reflection was even worse than before. His eyes were bloodshot, his face a mask of madness and terror, a caricature of the man he had been.
He looked at the screen in the water.
[Waterfall of Night]
[Coward's Stealth: 0/?]
[Healing Stagnation: 1/?]
[Forge of Brutality: 0/?]
[???]
[Tears of Regret: 1]
+1. One more Tear of Regret. The price of his agony.
He remembered the hope he had felt moments, or an eternity, earlier. That hope now seemed so distant, so naive. A cruel joke of this sadistic system.
He recalled the sentence. "There is no escape."
He finally understood. A truth more terrifying than any creature.
Hope was not allowed. Hope was not the key to getting out. Hope was the fuel for the machine. His suffering was the currency. And the game was eternal.
The low-frequency vibration persisted, barely audible, an echo of the cosmic horror.