‘Descending into a pitch-black abyss with bare, frostbitten hands,’ Sunny thought, his dirt-caked fingers searching blindly for the next lip of frozen granite.
‘If my old neighborhood gang in Sector 25 could see me now, they’d think I finally lost my mind.’
The wind inside the canyon was different from the howling gale on the ridge.
Here, trapped between two towering walls of black stone, it whistled like a dying breath, whirling the white fog into erratic, suffocating spirals.
Every ledge was coated in a thin sheen of black ice, turns so smooth and glass-like that a single misplaced heel meant a three-thousand-foot drop to the canyon floor.
‘Clack… clack…’
Far above him, the faint sound of chitinous limbs tapping against the high trail faded into nothingness.
The mountain scavengers were sweeping the upper road, searching for any stragglers who had fled the camp.
‘They won’t look down here,’ Sunny reasoned, his breathing light and rhythmic as he wedged his knee into a narrow fissure in the stone.
‘Predators are lazy by nature.
They look where the meat runs.
They don’t waste energy scaling a vertical cliff face unless they smell blood.’
He paused on a ledge barely wide enough for his two boots, leaning his forehead against the freezing rock face to let his burning forearm muscles recover.
His hands were numb, the skin torn and bleeding from the sharp edges of the stone, but his mind remained terrifyingly clear.
His shadow-sight mapped the terrain below.
Thirty feet down, the vertical cliff face met a wide, natural shelf carved into the belly of the mountain—a hidden cavern mouth yawning dark and ancient beneath an overhang of frozen stalactites.
‘A cave,’ Sunny observed, his dark blue eyes narrowing.
‘Either a shelter… or a den.’
He didn’t drop down immediately.
In the dark, rushing into an enclosed space without checking the perimeter was the fastest way to get cornered.
Holding his breath, Sunny willed his shadow to detach slightly from his feet.
The dark silhouette glided silently off the ledge, creeping down the vertical rock face like spilled ink.
It slid across the mouth of the cavern, probing the deep darkness within.
Through the faint, strange link connecting his soul to his shadow, Sunny felt… nothing.
No heat, no vibration of massive chitinous limbs, no heavy breathing of sleeping beasts.
Only the ancient, dormant draft of dry air flowing from the depths of the mountain.
‘Empty,’ Sunny thought, a small, cold spark of relief touching his chest. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
‘Or at least, whatever lived here hasn’t returned in a very long time.’
He eased his weight off the cliff, dropping the final ten feet and landing softly in the powdery snow gathered at the mouth of the cavern.
He rolled into a low crouch instantly, his right hand snapping to the hilt of his stolen shortsword.
Nothing moved.
The cavern entrance was vast, framed by jagged archways of dark stone that looked almost like the ribbed sternum of a long-dead dragon.
Snow had drifted into the first few yards, but deeper inside, the ground turned to smooth, ancient dust and scattered gravel, completely shielded from the elements.
Sunny unbuckled his wool cloak, shaking off the loose powder, and stepped into the cave.
The air inside was noticeably warmer—not hot, but several degrees above the freezing gale outside.
The bitter bite that had been slowly gnawing at his bones subsided into a manageable chill.
‘Safe from the wind.
Safe from the sky,’ Sunny evaluated, taking a slow, deep breath.
‘A good place to bleed out, or a good place to rest.
I prefer the second.’
He walked deeper into the gloom until the dim, ambient light of the fog-covered moon completely vanished.
To a normal human, the darkness inside would have been an impenetrable wall.
To Sunny, the interior of the cavern opened up into a towering, natural hall.
And then, his dark blue eyes caught something on the stone floor.
Sunny stopped dead in his tracks.
‘What is that…?’
Scattered across the floor of the cavern were not animal bones or broken rocks.
They were weapons.
Dozens of them.
Ancient, rusted broadswords, shattered spears, split wooden shields reinforced with bronze, and iron breastplates caved in by blunt, crushing force.
The metal was corroded by centuries of neglect, covered in a thick layer of grey dust, but the remnants of a ancient, forgotten clash were unmistakable.
‘A battle was fought inside this mountain,’ Sunny realized, his eyes scanning the quiet graveyard.
‘Centuries ago… maybe even millennia.’
He stepped carefully between the rusted swords, his boots crunching softly on the dry gravel.
Near the back wall of the cavern, half-buried under a pile of collapsed stone, sat a skeleton.
It was massive—far larger than any normal human—dressed in the ruined fragments of heavy, gilded plate armor that had somehow resisted the decay of time.
In its lap, the skeleton’s bony fingers were still clamped tightly around the hilt of a long, dark dagger. This story is hosted at g.com.
Unlike the rusted junk littering the floor, the dagger showed no signs of age.
Its blade was forged from an unknown, obsidian-like black metal, devoid of rust or nick, reflecting the pale, shadow-enhanced light of Sunny’s eyes with a dull, cold sheen.
Sunny approached the skeleton cautiously, his shortsword held low.
‘A fallen warrior,’ Sunny thought, staring at the ancient bones.
‘He died here, cornered in the dark, holding onto his last weapon.’
Sunny didn’t feel reverence.
He didn’t feel pity.
He simply saw an upgrade.
Leaning down, Sunny reached out his hand and wrapped his fingers around the obsidian hilt of the dagger.
The moment his skin touched the black metal, a sharp, icy sensation shot straight up his arm, settling deep within his chest where the faint, unawakened ember of divinity rested.
The golden runes flared into existence behind his eyelids, glowing with an intensity he had not seen before.
[You have claimed a Memory: ‘Obsidian Shard’.]
[Memory Rank: Awakened.]
[Memory Type: Weapon.]
[Memory Description: A blade forged from the dark heart of a fallen peak. It remembers the weight of the mountain, waiting for a hand cold enough to wield it.]
Sunny’s breath hitched.
‘An Awakened Memory…?’
He stared at the sleek black dagger in his grip, feeling its weight, its balance, its lethal precision.
Compared to the heavy, chipped shortsword he had stolen from the soldier, this blade felt like a natural extension of his own hand—light, balanced, and deadly sharp.
A dark, genuine grin broke across Sunny’s filthy, tired face in the quiet darkness of the cave.
‘A cloak to keep out the frost.
A blade that can cut through stone.
A hidden cave beneath the world,’ Sunny thought, turning the obsidian dagger in his grip as his shadow settled comfortably at his feet.
He sat down against the stone wall beside the ancient skeleton, pulling his wool cloak tight around his shoulders, and closed his eyes.
‘Let the storm rage outside.
Let the monsters search the pass.’
‘Tomorrow…
I start hunting back.’