Chương 29: Rift Dimension

Lonely drifts the rift-realm yonder, red as blood and deep as night; there no road is road for wanderer, there no star remembers light. Wounds hang bright like chapel candles, each one cut through mortal air; demons pass in endless sandals, dragging crowns and children's prayer. O heed, young soul, thy mother's warning: walk not where torn heavens bend. For he who enters Vyrmgaard's crossing, finds every path has death at end.

—'Song of the Rift-Realm', Written by Anatoly Lermontov Light blurred around Orland until the world stopped being a world at all. Sound warped. Sibinski's cheers stretched into a long, thin howl, and the sunmane lion's roar bent sideways through his skull. Miriyela's breathing—which had been right beneath his ear a moment ago—suddenly sounded both too close and impossibly far away.

Even weight vanished from his body so completely that his stomach floated up into his throat, and for one horrible second, he couldn't tell whether he was clinging to Miriyela's back or falling through her. Then his vision snapped open into pure madness. They were standing somewhere. Probably. Miriyela's feet had found ground, or something that pretended well enough to be ground, and Sharsana was also beside them with all four claws spread wide, head low, tail stiff, every molescale along her spine bristling.

But Orland couldn't tell where the ground ended or began. There was no sky, no ceiling, no walls, and no damned horizon. Everything around them was a reddish-purple vastness folded over itself in layers of light, shadow, and distance that didn't behave right. The rift was behind them. He knew that much only because it still looked like the same giant wound they'd jumped through—and then the giant sunmane lion ripped through it.

The silver-violet edges stretched wide as the lion shoved its golden head through, then one massive shoulder, then its entire body, forcing the Rare-Grade rift open with brute strength until cracks of light raced along its edges. Its three crimson eyes found Orland at once.

"... Run!" Orland shouted, tightening his arms around Miriyela's shoulders.

"Where?" Miriyela shouted back, and her voice was shaky, distorted in this space.

"Forward! Just go somewhere!"

"Great Hero, forgive me, but I am not certain where 'forward' is exactly!"

"Just run away from the lion!" That was enough for her. Miriyela kicked off whatever passed for ground and sprinted into the warped space, Sharsana bounding beside her a half-step later. For a few moments, moving in this realm felt completely wrong. Miriyela ran, but the world slid under her in uneven lunges. Sometimes each stride seemed to carry them ten meters. Sometimes it carried them far more.

Sometimes the path ahead curled 'down' without ever becoming a slope, and Orland had to bite his tongue to keep from hurling out of pure nausea. Okay! Think… and un-focus! And the way to do that was to squint. He squinted hard, trying to reduce the flood of warped information entering his head. As far as he could tell, the rift dimension was endless, but the more he forced himself to un-focus, the more major details crawled out of the blur. For one, this entire space resembled the deep sea.

Well, he'd never actually seen a sea before, but he imagined this was what it was like: cold, empty, and dark beyond comparison. Even still, he could see—close and far away in equal parts—countless dozens and hundreds of other rifts around them, floating in the warped space. Some of them were small and thin, while others were twice as large as the one they'd jumped through. All of them had different glows as well, like lanterns shining underwater. And between those rifts moved dots.

At first, he thought they were sparks. Then one of the closer dots unfolded into a hunched, antlered silhouette carrying a jagged spear, and another crawled on four arms with a spine full of lead-black thorns. Demons. Thousands… no, tens of thousands of them. Maybe even hundreds of thousands. His mouth went dry. Every rift had streams of demons passing to and from it, marching, crawling, leaping, flying with ragged wings, or being shoved forward by even larger shapes behind them.

Many of them dragged supplies, corpses, broken weapons, and things he couldn't comprehend with them, but in an instant, he understood what Kazimir had said about the rift dimension being an intermediary for the demonic armies. This was the invasion road. This was where all demons had to pass through if they wanted to leave Vyrmgaard. This was the Tyrant's throat—but knowing that only made Orland's grin return, though very strained. We're on the right track, then! Zimnerudik's rift has to be somewhere around here!

Unfortunately, a cluster of nearby demons noticed them. Their antlered heads stopped halfway through stepping into a rift, their long heads turning. Then another cluster of demons lifted their blades of dark bones and shrieked. Then even more clusters noticed. Dozens. Hundreds. The nearest ones bent away from their own rifts and began charging towards Miriyela and Sharsana, running straight up, down, and sideways from every conceivable direction.

But when the first cluster reached them, the sunmane lion ripped them apart with a single swipe of its paw. Another cluster of tiny imp-like demons leapt at its back with astral lead spears, but the spears shattered on impact with its pelt. The lion twisted, roared, and tore all of them apart in one shake of its jaws. Another cluster of demons tried to approach it from under its belly, and one massive back leg kicked them so hard they immediately vanished down into the endless abyss.

The lion still chased the three of them, but now it also had to fight through every demon trying to attack it first. Orland's grin widened for real.

"The lion will be our bait and shield for a bit!" he shouted into Miriyela's ear.

"Don't let it catch us, but don't lose it either!"

"I do not intend to!"

"Good! Now, you said something before—every mine sings a different 'tune' to the dwarves, right?" A huge spear spun out from a demon's hand somewhere ahead. Miriyela swerved, and the weapon carved through the space so close to Orland's shoulder that he felt its cold wake through the molescale cape.

"That… is so!" Miriyela shouted, regaining her stride.

"Every deep vein has its own choir, and every ore sings its own hymn!"

"Okay!" Then he shifted his arms so she could glance down and see the songiron bands around his wrists.

"And these bands! You said they're capable of resonating with every metal there is, right?" For a few breaths, Miriyela was quiet except for her heavy breathing. Then she glanced back, her veil snapping against her cheek under the strange wind of the realm.

"So that is your plan?" she shouted.

"Yep! And I'm already feeling the bands shaking and vibrating in really, really weird patterns, so tell me: what's the pattern of Zimnerudik supposed to feel like?" This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Great Hero, I should be the one to listen! My body was born to read the deep choruses! If you would just press your bands to my neck, I could—" Another volley of spears came at them from the side, and Miriyela ducked while Sharsana pounced forward to intercept all of them with her scaly spine.

"No!" Orland shouted, clinging harder.

"You focus on running! Just don't trip, don't fall, and describe what the pattern should feel like to me! That's why I asked all the nearby Rift Sealing Corps to remove as many metals as they could from around their rifts! That way, in this fucked-up realm of warped space, even I can probably pick out the pattern of the Zimnerudik mine!" Miriyela looked hesitant for a second before snapping her head forward again.

"Then listen well, Great Hero! Zimnerudik's song is not a clean bell-tone! The mine was excavated under salt-thick earth and old frost pressure from the distant Lake Volchava, so its resonance pulls inward first, then rings outward in three narrow turns! The metals there hum low, climb sharply, and the songs always break twice before returning with a hollow undernote, as though… as though a deep drum were struck beneath frozen water!" Orland blinked.

That meant absolutely nothing to him, but he squeezed his eyes shut nonetheless. Immediately, the rift dimension tried to crawl deeper into his head. Demonic whispers pressed around him in rough, overlapping fragments—some praying, some cursing, some laughing with mouths that sounded wet and broken—so he forced them away. He forced away the lion's roars, Miriyela's footsteps, Sharsana's growls, and the distant shrieks of demons away. He focused only on the songiron bands around his wrists, and…

well, they were vibrating alright. He could sort of vaguely tell there was some sort of pattern to their resonating, but he couldn't understand it. Of course he couldn't. He wasn't a dwarf. He wasn't even a trained songiron band user. Hells, he couldn't even read the tag of his songiron bands to know exactly what they did. He was just a dumbass who jumped into rifts with stolen relics and monsters chasing him—but that was fine. He didn't have to understand the resonating patterns.

"... Your move," he muttered, clenching his jaw so hard it hurt.

"Either you come the fuck out and help me, or we all die in here." For a moment, there was no response Then the voices flared—all five of them speaking up at once, muttering and mumbling and shouting over each other so quickly he couldn't catch every word. He heard a pissed-off lady complaining he was reckless and a dumbass. A calm man said he was just a reckless boy. An old man even sighed heavily while a young man comforted him with what sounded like a few pats on the back.

But then a young girl's voice—the same one he'd heard back in Milena's relic closet—rose above the others.

"You don't have the dwarves' keen sensitivity to metal," she whispered,"but I do. I can read the songiron resonance well enough."

"You can?" Orland shouted out loud, making Miriyela glance back at him. She was probably wondering if he was talking to her, but he didn't have time to explain now.

"Then, can you—""It's that rift down there, to your right," she murmured.

"Your dwarf companion describes songs well." Orland snapped his eyes open and looked down. Beneath them, several distorted layers of space down, a particularly large rift blazed with lead-silver light. A few clusters of demons were already crowded around it, shoving and crawling over one another to enter. The moment he saw it, the moment he felt it: that was the Zimnerudik rift.

"That one!" he shouted, pointing down at the rift.

"That's our rift!" Miriyela snapped her head down to follow his gaze. Then she swerved straight down as though it was a perfectly normal direction to run in, her steps striking an invisible slope that appeared under her only when she trusted it. Sharsana followed with a beast's instinct, claws digging into warped space.

"How are you so sure?" Miriyela shouted over her shoulder.

"What if that is not the right one?"

"It's the right one!" He grinned, breathless and terrified and proud.

"I'm the Hero, after all!"

"... Well said!" Miriyela laughed back, before tearing her warhorn from her side and blowing it once. The sound thundered across the rift dimension, deep and royal and utterly out of place among the demonic whispers. Every demon around Zimnerudik's rift turned to look up.

Antlers, horns, tusks, bone masks, lead-black eyes, and open mouths all faced the charging princess and her mole-drake, but the wild, frenzied bloodlust in their faces all melted away the moment they saw the giant sunmane lion also barreling their way. Orland laughed too, because fear had nowhere else to go. Then a calm man spoke in his ear as he felt his skin thickening from Miriyela's relic warhorn.

"Listen carefully, boy. About that four-horned elkkin demon you struggled to defeat, there is something you can do that you should've done a while ago." And Orland listened carefully as the calm man told him exactly what he needed to do. He paused. Then, a few heartbeats later, he tilted his head in confusion.

"I can do that?" he mumbled. Several voices immediately groaned inside his head.

"Of course you can," the furious lady snapped.

"You've always been able to do it, but you just can't fucking read, so you never realized it when you looked at its tag. What, were you planning on fighting the four-horned demon without that upgrade?"

"Well, I just knew I could get you to help me out," he muttered, tightening his arm around Miriyela as demonic arrows started flying at them from below.

"But if what you're saying is true, that's even better."

"Then do what I told you," the calm man said.

"Now." Orland nodded, leaning closer to Miriyela's ear.

"Hey, Miriyela! Can I have your broken crown?" Even while charging toward a rift packed with demons, pelted by arrows, Miriyela managed to glance back with delight bright enough to be seen through her veil.

"My crown? Oh, Great Hero, are we to be wed amidst battle and divine shadow? The ceremony can wait until after the rift is sealed, of course, though I shall not refuse such noble urgency if your heart has awakened—""I'm not marrying you!"

"Oh!"

"And… uh, I might have to destroy the crown!" Miriyela's stride hitched for only a fraction of a second. Orland forced his next words out before pride or fear could choke them.

"But… if you let me have it, I'll win," he said sternly.

"No matter what." For another moment, Miriyela said nothing. Demons rushed toward them. The sunmane lion roared behind them. Sharsana snarled and snapped at something that got too close, while the Zimnerudik rift grew larger and larger ahead, silver light pouring over them like cold fire. Then the corner of Miriyela's veil lifted with her smile.

"... A king without a crown is no king at all," she said, voice proud and clear as she glanced back at him.

"But do you know what else is true, Great Hero? A crown with no king is no crown at all, either, and crowns can always be reforged!" So she reached down, pulled the cracked crown from her waist, and passed it back to him.

"You must win, Great Hero," she said.

"For Kamengrad." Orland grabbed the broken crown firmly and nodded. The demons right before the rift braced themselves. Miriyela lowered her shoulders and charged. Sharsana barreled beside her, and behind them, the sunmane lion tore through the red-purple realm in furious pursuit. He couldn't help himself. That anxious, excited grin found its way back onto his face once again. Alright, demon. Let's have a rematch. Deep beneath Zimnerudik, Arkhor of the Four-Horns felt the first wrongness crawl around his neck.

Around him, several dozens of Uncommon-Grade elkkin demons continued excavating the collapsed mineshaft, pulling boulders and wooden beams away from the tunnel that led to the surface. In three days—perhaps two if they labored without rest—they'd be able to break out of the mine and surge into the town itself, but that was only if the reinforcements due to arrive ten minutes ago arrived in time. Where are they? Arkhor scowled as he turned and stared at the giant rift right behind him. Something was wrong.

Its wound-light pulsed strangely, swelling and shrinking with a rhythm that didn't belong to the Tyrant's ordered will. The edge was trembling. The whispers pouring through it sounded crowded, strained, and almost… frightened. He took a step back from the giant rift as it began to warble.

"What is this shadow?" he murmured in the old tongue.

"Great Tyrant, Lord of the Lead Star, why does your road shiver?" But dread answered before doctrine did. The rift suddenly exploded with a flash of golden light—in stark contrast to the reddish-purple light—and before Arkhor could reach up and snap off his horns, a lion-masked boy burst out of the rift, gauntlet clenched into a fist. A wild, filthy cackle came along with the boy.

"I'm back, bitch!" The gauntleted fist struck Arkhor square in the chest. Shock broke his breath as he immediately flew back, propelled by the sheer momentum that came with the boy exiting the rift, but he managed to stab his horns into the ground and stop himself before he could slam into anything dangerous. Then the rift behind the boy screamed wider still, and something immense, golden, and furious exploded into the chamber after him.

And in that moment—framed by the golden rift and shadowed by a giant sunmane lion—Arkhor saw the visage of the great demon-slayer that would end their dreams.