Chương 128: Chapter 61: It Is Never Enough

They kept walking, leaving behind the storehouse of emotions. The cold, which had been kept at bay in the strange whiteness of the initial hallway, returned with a renewed intensity, a cold that seeped into their bones and caused their breath to come out in thick clouds that took time to dissipate. This time they arrived at what appeared to be a library. It was orderly chaos. Towering bookshelves of black ebony rose until they were lost in the darkness of the ceiling, crammed with tomes of all sizes and colors.

The air smelled of old parchment dust, but also of something sweet and stale, like rotting fruit. For Selena, it was a magnet. Her instinct as a seeker of knowledge drove her toward the shelves before reason could stop her. She extended her hand to touch the spine of a book bound in greenish hide. Then, she felt the tug. The same sharp tingling, the same visceral warning she felt when the echo of an object resonated nearby. She recoiled just in time. The book transformed.

Its spine split open into a row of sharp, pale teeth, like blades of carved bone. The other volumes on the shelf did the same, a sinister chorus of jaws opening and closing with a dry snap. And they did not just bite. They spoke. In raspy, overlapping whispers, they began to recite poetry, verses in dead languages, fragments of forgotten tragedies, all while stretching out from the shelves, their pages turned into serpentine tongues that sought to hook, trap, and cut. —Back!

—Magnor shouted, raising his staff, but Selena had already acted. She had no time for calculations, nor to measure the cost. Pure survival instinct, sharpened by months of training and by the proximity of jaws lunging toward her face, took control. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. It was a silent verb, a command carved from the will and directed at the very heart of matter: it was fire. From the center of each animated book, a flame erupted.

Though it was no ordinary fire; the flame was a deep and vibrant emerald green, the same green of her eyes and of the dress she had worn at court. A hot, ravenous fire that did not crackle, but rather consumed in silence. In less than a second, the books were reduced to fine ash that fell to the floor like black snow. The heat that emanated was intense and dry, a burst of summer in the midst of the sepulchral cold, pushing back the shadows for an instant.

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the faint clinking of the falling ash. Magnor slowly lowered his staff, without taking his eyes off Selena. His eyes, usually cordial, were serious. —You were quick this time —he said, his deep voice echoing in the now half-empty room. Selena had her hands on her chest; she turned slightly upon hearing his voice. —But be cautious, Countess. If you keep paying that price so lightly… He made a significant pause. —They will consume you before they can.

Selena did not answer. She felt a slight emptiness, a sigh stolen from her future, the cost of the green flame. Magnor was right. Each spell was a pact with her own mortality. Behind the incinerated library, as if it were the logical conclusion of that place of perverted knowledge, the next spiral staircase was born. They descended, but this time the atmosphere was different. There was no weeping, nor any recognizable sounds.

In their place, they felt a terrible physical oppression in the chest, a weight that increased with each step descended. It was as if the air had turned to lead, and each breath required a conscious, desperate effort. Almost a suffocation, a slow and progressive strangulation that threatened to crush their lungs before reaching the bottom. Upon reaching the second floor of the descent at last, the reason for that oppression became evident. The entire floor was covered in a thick, viscous layer of blood.

But it was not dry, nor was it oxidized. It pulsed. With a slow, measured, yet unmistakable rhythm, the dark and shiny surface rose and fell gently, as if connected to an invisible heart buried in the depths of the dungeon. The sound was a dull, wet thudding that vibrated through the soles of their boots. In the distance, floating above the pulsing silence, conversations could be heard. Human voices, cheerful and carefree, speaking in a fast, musical language that none of them recognized.

They seemed like fragments of a market day, a family dinner, a youthful romance, totally alien to the horror of the setting. The contrast was insane. Following Magnor, who advanced with careful steps so as not to splash too much, they ventured into the chamber. It was then that they saw it. A man, or what had been a man. He wore armor of hardened leather and iron plates, of an ancient style. He had no head. The neck ended in a scarred, black stump, as if the decapitation had occurred centuries ago.

His belly was sliced wide open, a vertical slit from the sternum to the pelvis, revealing a dark and dry void inside. Stolen novel; please report. But he walked. With slow, shuffling steps, from one side of the chamber to the other, treading in his own pulsing blood. And from him, from the headless neck or from the abdominal cavity, words emerged. They were not shrieked cries of pain, but fragments of dialogue, clear and pathetic: —"Majesty… I have failed you…" —he said with a tone of deep regret.

A few steps further, the register shifted, the voice sounding younger, almost hopeful: —"I hope the War of the Counts is over when we return… My wife awaits me with our son." The War of the Counts, and he spoke in Volg-thûr. Selena made the mental calculation quickly. A feudal conflict from the first eight hundred years of Erabergh. That miserable wretch had been wandering around, repeating his final worries, for at least four thousand one hundred and fifty years.

A shiver ran down her spine, making her skin crawl beneath the felis armor. Magnor raised a hand, still as a statue. Everyone froze. They waited, holding their breath in the middle of the thick air, until the decapitated soldier moved far enough away, dragging his feet through the throbbing blood. With another gesture, Magnor indicated for them to move on, bypassing the living specter. But the path they took soon proved to be another dead end.

The next room, visible through an archway, did not obey the laws of Euclidean geometry. The angles of the walls bent back on themselves, the floor seemed to slope upward, and the ceiling descended in impossible spirals. Looking directly at it caused instant nausea and a throbbing pain in the temple. It was a wound in reality, a place where spatial logic had shattered. Magnor made another gesture, quick and decisive. The meaning was clear:"Retreat. Find another route."

As they turned around, walking with extreme care so as not to make waves in the sea of blood, it happened. An arm, severed from the body, pale and withered, lay half-submerged in the thick liquid. Feeling the small disturbances of their passage, the fingers of the arm closed spasmodically. Then, with surprising strength, the limb began to crawl toward them, clawing its way through the blood with grotesque determination. There was no time for spells, nor for strategies.

Magnor acted out of pure instinct and brute force. With a swift, brutal motion, he raised his heavy staff of reinforced wood and drove it with all his might through the wrist of the arm, impaling it against the stone floor beneath the blood. The arm thrashed violently, its fingers clawing the air, before being pinned fast, still throbbing with faint fury beside the wooden shaft. Magnor did not attempt to retrieve his weapon. He simply drew another identical staff from the harness on his back.

—Let us move on —he whispered. His voice was so low it was barely audible over the constant thumping of the blood and the distant, yet cheerful murmurs of ghosts. Without looking back, he led the group back through the nightmare path, desperately seeking a route that would take them lower, deeper, toward the heart of the dungeon where, perhaps, the answer to everything awaited. They kept walking, venturing deeper into the belly of the cursed mountain.

The corridors no longer followed a consistent logic; sometimes they narrowed until forcing them to pass in single file, brushing the damp walls with their shoulders. At other times, they widened into empty chambers where the echo of their footsteps was lost in a deceptive vastness. The stone, which before had been white and inert sandstone, now seemed to have absorbed the pulsing of the blood from the floor.

In certain stretches, the walls throbbed gently, with a slow and organic rhythm, as though the rock itself had been impregnated by the living essence of the pulsing blood. It was a sickening sensation, like walking through the arteries of a petrified but still drowsy giant. They reached a wide, low room that, by its layout, evoked a communal dormitory. Remnants of stone beds and empty chests lay scattered about. There were no hostile shadows, at least, not in the way they expected.

In their place, shadows of memory appeared. Translucent, silent figures, like smudges of blurred ink in the air, repeating routine actions. One lay down upon an invisible bed, turning uncomfortably. Another, near a wall, brought her fingers to her lips and blew softly, putting out a candle that never existed. A couple more, with martial postures, made the slow and monotonous round of guards, crossing the room from one end to the other without paying the slightest attention to the group of intruders.

When Magnor raised his staff in a guard stance, ready for a phantom attack, the shadow-guard simply passed through the weapon without altering his rhythm, completely unfazed. They were not conscious entities, nor aggressive specters. They were echoes, residues of lives trapped in an eternal and irrelevant instant, like a film projected over and over onto the stone. The effect was more desolating than any direct threat.

It showed a different kind of cruelty: that of reducing existence to an absurd, endless repetition. They passed through that room of everyday ghosts, feeling the weight of a thousand nights of vigil, of interrupted sleep, and of forgotten routines. At the end, as on each level, another descent awaited them. A narrow staircase, crudely carved, plunging into an even deeper darkness. With held sighs, no longer of exertion, but of a growing fatigue of the soul, they went down. The change was immediate and overwhelming.

The multitude of weeping, the oppression in the chest, it was not the same sensation. It was replaced by an absolute silence. Not the silence of an empty place, but an active, oppressive one that seemed to absorb any sound. Their own footsteps, the rustle of clothes, their breathing… everything was muffled, as if the air itself were damp cotton. There was no echo, no distant whisper, no pulsing of the stone.

It was an auditory void so profound that it began to make their ears ring by contrast, generating a dull, claustrophobic anxiety. Upon passing the threshold that marked the new floor, the architecture of the place underwent a brutal transformation. It left behind the carved sandstone or regular blocks to become smooth, organic stone, like that of a natural cave formed over eons. And with the change of stone, sound returned all at once. But it was not a benevolent sound. It was whispers.

Hundreds, thousands of whispers, which came from no cardinal point but instead seemed to be born inside their own ears, resonating in their cranial bones. Overlapping, urgent, anxious voices, all whispering the same thing with slight variations:"One more…"

"There is always more…"

"I need more…"

"Give me more…"

"It is never enough…" It was the insatiable murmur of avarice, of desire turned into pure obsession. A chorus of greedy ghosts who yearned, who demanded, who suffered from the lack of something they never named, but which seemed to be the very essence of their torture. The whispers tangled themselves in their thoughts, threatening to drown out reason beneath a sea of collective anxiety.