Walkers. Walk. Alone.

It's a phrase drilled into me since I first wore the crest. Since the ink dried on my name and I was sanctioned to stride between worlds. A maxim passed down like gospel among us.

And yet—again and again—it's been proven wrong.

Walkers don't walk alone. Not really. We walk with ghosts. With orders. With agendas whispered by people who never cross a gate themselves. With monsters trailing our steps and memories hanging from our backs like rusted swords.

But today?

Today I was truly, painfully, walking alone.

No Ten. No Cordelia.

Just me, and Lumivis. And even he wasn't a companion, not really. More like a reflection. A recordkeeper given form. A witness masquerading as a guardian.

My steps crunched against the desiccated crust of salt and bone beneath me as I continued forward, stretching my aura toward the one thing I did know—that something had set eyes on me.

Not in a predatory way. Not yet.

Hungry, yes.

But not violent.

Not yet.

I'd felt hunger before. The kind that lingers on the edges of a battlefield. The kind that beasts wear in their eyes, not for survival, but for sport. This wasn't that. This was… different.

Patient. Heavy. Like an ocean watching from the other side of the horizon.

Ten ate a dragon from here. The thought bubbled up, uninvited.

Ten. Of all people. Ate. A. Dragon.

I stopped mid-step. Looked up. The twin suns were still locked above me, swirled behind layers of roiling amber clouds. A shimmer in the sky danced like a mirage—heat or something worse.

I shook the thought off. Hard.

There was no way a dragon was at the center of this realm. That would be too convenient. Too absurd.

…Right?

It's a possibility. It's a plausibility.

"Lumivis," I said aloud, feeling the heat of the word leave my tongue dry. "Just because I know you can hear my thoughts—don't pretend you can't—what's the likelihood I'm walking toward a dragon right now?"

A pause. Then, beside me, a ripple of silvery starlight. His form coalesced like poured mercury, arms folded, that same serene expression etched into his features.

"Calculations estimate a forty-five percent likelihood, Sire."

I exhaled. Long. Slow. Bitter.

"A coinflip," I muttered. "It's basically a coinflip with teeth."

"Large teeth," he added, helpfully.

"I'm going to ignore the fact that you included this in your model."

"I had to adjust the projection based on the known activity of Apex predators in this region, the mythologies compiled in Ten's report, and your current path—"

"I said I'm ignoring it," I cut in, already regretting the question.

We kept walking.

I let the silence settle again. Let the sands do their whispering, and the air hum around us like a plucked string. This realm wasn't loud. It was never loud. Just filled with a suffocating, ambient hum—like it wanted to say something but didn't have the tongue to form words.

A salt breeze curled around my legs. I didn't stop. I just adjusted my grip on the odachi.

I had stopped trusting breezes here.

The land around me had changed again.

No longer dunes. The sand thinned into cracked tiles—ceramic, fractured and scorched. As if this had once been a city. Or at least something that thought itself civilized. I crouched down, brushing away the dust.

Carvings. Worn to the point of ruin. Glyphs. No language I recognized. My Lexicon Arte gave me the sense of meaning without translation. A sense of reverence. Worship. Sacrifice.

"Religious structure?" I murmured.

"A shrine," Lumivis confirmed beside me. "Or at least… it was."

"To what?"

"That," he said, pointing ahead, "is unclear."

I turned.

And saw the monolith.

It rose from the cracked plain like a tooth. Black obsidian, covered in salt deposits and bloodstains both fresh and ancient. Symbols wrapped around it in a spiral. As I approached, they shifted—slid like oil across its surface—always staying just out of view, refusing comprehension.

The closer I got, the louder the hum in my ears became. Not physical. Not real. Not quite.

Inside me, something stirred.

Not fear. Not awe.

Recognition.

This was the anomaly.

Not the Hollow. Not the goblins. Not the snipers or the shifting dunes. This.

"Lumivis," I whispered, eyes locked to the swirling glyphs. "I think this is what I was sent to find."

"Yes," he said softly. "But you must not touch it."

"I wasn't planning to."

"Good. Because I don't know what it does, and if I have to forcibly dissolve your limbs to stop you from triggering a planar event, I will."

"Charming."

"Your safety is my priority."

"You were just going to let me get eaten by a Hollow twenty minutes ago."

"That was different."

"How?"

"You're alive now. Thus, clearly, I made the right decision."

I sighed. "You're impossible."

"I'm calibrated."

We circled the monolith from a distance, never stepping too close. My aura remained stretched as far as I could safely maintain it, but the stone seemed to warp it—pull it inward, or deflect it outright. Like it didn't want to be known.

Every time I tried to focus, the surface shimmered again. The spiral shifting.

Left to right. Clockwise.

Then counterclockwise.

Then vertical.

It wasn't just a structure. It was a lock. A barrier. A seal.

What the hell had this realm tried to bury?

"Lumivis."

"Yes, Sire?"

"I'm sending a fragment of aura memory back to the Gloss Network."

"Unstable connection. Message might degrade or be lost entirely."

"Then I'll send it again. As many times as I have to."

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I opened a page. A folded prayer of paper infused with memory. I whispered to it. Etched my impression of the monolith into the folds. The sight. The sound. The feeling. A full sensory impression.

The paper ignited—not with fire, but light—and vanished upward in a streak of gold.

Then I turned to Lumivis.

"I'm going in."

He didn't blink. Didn't try to stop me.

"Of course," he said. "After all—Walkers walk alone."

I didn't approach the monolith directly. Instead, I searched the surrounding ruins, looking for why this structure existed. I needed context. I needed story.

Behind the monolith was a half-collapsed corridor, swallowed by sand and time. My paper folded into a lantern, glowing softly with starlight to guide me down. Inside, I found murals. Broken, yes. But not erased.

A serpent. A beast. Coiling. Devouring light. A Walker. Or something like one. Sword held high. Then another panel—the beast rotting, not slain. Still alive, still coiling, but now its scales were cracked, oozing tar.

And beneath it, a cube.

I froze.

"Lumivis."

"I see it."

"The cube I picked up—wasn't made here. It was here. And someone took it."

"Or," he said, stepping into the frame of the mural beside me, "someone set it free."

My throat was dry. My tongue like parchment.

"…this place wasn't built to worship the beast."

"No."

"It was built to contain it."

"Yes."

"And someone is trying to open the gate."

"More likely," Lumivis said softly, "they already did."

The hunger I'd felt watching me?

Not waiting.

Not lurking.

Coming.

"Lumivis," I asked, my voice low, barely audible beneath the sand-laced wind. "Am I allowed to leave? This is clearly above my Soul Realm."

The starlit man tilted his head, posture still regal despite the ruin and dread around us. "Yes, Sire. I'd say that's of dire importance."

The ground beneath us shuddered.

Not a tremor. A pulse. As if the world had a heart—and it had just skipped a beat.

We both froze.

Then the sound came. Deep. Resonant. The kind of sound that made your bones ache and your instincts scream that something had gone terribly wrong.

The monolith behind us began to vibrate. No—sing. A low, droning tone, not musical but resonant. Harmonic in the way tectonic plates might grind in accord.

And then it screamed.

Not loud. Not violent. But a psychic, invisible scream—right into the marrow of our beings. The sky itself seemed to darken, bleeding gold into black. Salt lifted into the air as if pulled upward by something far, far older than gravity.

Lumivis's form flickered—briefly. I had never seen that before. His shape shimmered with static, as if struggling to keep itself cohesive.

"Yes, Sire," he said again, voice now tight with strain. "I'd say it's now of utmost importance."

I didn't hesitate.

I turned and ran.

We sprinted away from the monolith, sand crunching underfoot as the sky writhed above us. Lightning—or something that only looked like lightning—cracked across the twin suns, fracturing them into prism-like reflections. The entire realm had gone wrong.

Behind us, I heard it.

A sound like chains dragging across stone. Not physical chains. Chains made of memory. Soundless, and yet more deafening than thunder.

I didn't dare look.

"What is it?!" I shouted, pushing my legs harder. Every muscle burned, every breath was grit.

"I don't know," Lumivis answered, flickering at my side like a flame in a storm. "It's not from this realm."

"Not from—what does that mean?!"

"I mean, nothing in this system matches that signature. This is not part of the local spiritual ecology. This is a foreigner."

Another pulse rocked the ground. Not ahead. Beneath.

The salt plain cracked like a sheet of porcelain, spirals of tar-black fluid rising like veins from the earth.

And then it roared.

No breath. No lungs. But still—it roared.

It sounded like silence being torn open.

It sounded like the absence of sound, forced to scream.

We both staggered. My aura faltered for a moment, nearly collapsing in on itself. Lumivis's outline burst apart, reforming a second later like shattering glass reversed in time.

"Keep moving," he barked.

"I AM—"

"Faster."

He didn't need to say it twice.

I ran.

The tiles of the ruined city blurred beneath me. My breath came ragged, the heat warping the air around me as the realm itself twisted in protest. The sky—if it could even be called that anymore—was flickering between realities, opening and closing like a blinking eye. I could feel it behind us.

Watching.

No. Not watching.

Hunting.

Lumivis snapped his fingers, and a wall of starlight erupted behind us, fractal geometry pulsing outward, trying to hold it back. I risked a glance.

It wasn't a creature.

It wasn't even a shape.

It was an idea, trying to wear form.

A mass of impossible geometry. Jagged limbs that didn't follow anatomical law. Eyes that opened into different skies. Veins like rivers running backward. Teeth—so many teeth—and none of them in a mouth. It tore through Lumivis's barrier like wet parchment, and reality screamed with it.

I cursed. Reached into my sleeves and threw two folded slips of aura-infused paper behind me. The first expanded into a massive origami lion, made from bronze parchment and lined with razor glyphs. The second burst into a cyclone of paper moths, each imbued with trace sigils of light and fragmentation.

The lion tackled the entity.

It tried.

It failed.

The moths exploded like firecrackers against a wall of darkness, illuminating nothing. I kept running, heart threatening to burst from my chest.

"How is it faster than us?!" I shouted.

"It's not," Lumivis responded grimly. "It's smarter."

Sure enough, it didn't pursue us in a straight line. It disappeared into the earth again—moving through the realmskin like it belonged to it.

"That's cheating!"

"It's winning!"

Another pulse tore through the land. A fissure opened ahead of us, a canyon plunging into pure blackness. We'd be dead in seconds.

"Hold!"

I stabbed my odachi into the ground, poured my aura into it, and shouted, "Page: Bridge of the Last Word!"

A ripple of golden paper erupted beneath us, unrolling like a scroll across the chasm, forming a bridge of folded syllables and blade-thin ink lines. We bolted across it. The bridge groaned, unraveling as soon as our feet left it.

Behind us, the chasm snapped closed—as if it had never been.

We didn't stop running until we hit the ridge.

A mountain of salt-glass rose before us. Jagged. Crystalline. Unclimbable. I turned to Lumivis.

"Can we jump it?"

"Negative."

"Can we go around it?"

"We don't have the time."

Another roar behind us. That thing wasn't gone. It was waiting.

"Hollowed skies," I muttered. "Okay."

I reached into my sleeve. Pulled out a last fold. My emergency stash.

"Page: Wings of the Archivist."

The paper unfolded itself along my back, grafting into shimmering, ink-dipped wings shaped like stylized ravens. I bent my knees, concentrated—

"Hold onto me."

Lumivis, for once, obeyed without a quip.

We jumped.

The wings strained. They weren't made for two passengers, and the salt wind fought us the whole way. But we made it—just barely—crashing down into a bowl-shaped valley on the other side.

We tumbled. Rolled. I hit the ground hard, wings exploding into scattered glyphs around me.

I didn't move for a moment. Just breathed.

Breathe in. Taste salt and blood.

Breathe out. Feel bones protest.

Then I sat up.

"Still alive?"

Lumivis stood, brushing nothing off his starlight form. "Moderately."

I laughed. Once. Hollow.

"What… was that?" I asked, finally voicing the question.

"I don't know. But it recognized the monolith."

"Recognized?"

"It paused when it saw it. Then it screamed."

"…what does that mean?"

"I think," Lumivis said slowly, "the monolith isn't just a seal. It's a warning. And that thing—whatever it was—knows what's buried here."

A silence settled between us. The kind that felt loud. The kind that felt like something was listening.

Finally, I said, "We need to leave. Now."

"Yes," Lumivis agreed.

"Walker provision authorizes retreat on world-class anomalies, yes?"

"Yes."

"Then activate the return glyph. Get me out of this realm."

Lumivis raised a hand. Starlight spiraled into a sigil above us. It pulsed once.

Then twice.

Then—

It fizzled.

"Why didn't it activate?" I demanded.

He stared at it. Then at the sky.

Then at me.

"Because… we're being watched."

I reached for my blade.

And I felt it too.

No movement. No noise.

Just a presence. Heavy. Cold.

And hungry.

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