The Fall

Clack... creak-clack...

The sound was faint and crisp, with the unmistakable texture of old metal components grinding, meshing, and turning against one another under tremendous force!

Its rumble held a cold, mechanically precise rhythm.

It was no sound of nature! Nor could any monster have made it!

Aegon's violet eyes shrank to pinpoints in an instant. An almost tangible chill exploded from his tailbone and shot up his spine to the crown of his head!

An image flashed through his mind-just a short while earlier, as he crossed a stretch of the path beneath his feet, he had glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye. Deep in the seams between those enormous stone slabs, there seemed to be several inconspicuous metal wedges, each the width of a bowl and covered in dark red rust!

At the time, he had merely assumed they were part of the ancient structure and given them no further thought.

Now, the direction of that regular, eerie mechanical clicking... matched perfectly with the arrangement of those unusual metal wedges in his memory!

He wasn't waiting. He wasn't afraid! He was... operating something!

Activating those wedges one by one-or rather, releasing their locks!

Like a master craftsman using specialized tools to calmly knock out the last few safety joints supporting a gate of crushing weight!

"Fall back! Spread out! Grab anything fixed in place!" Aegon's roar tore through the fear and silence with every ounce of his strength, like the bellow of a dying beast.

The instant that cry left his mouth, he fully understood Corlyon's intent and the truth of this place.

This was no ancient passage made fragile by years of neglect. It was an enormous, meticulously designed tilting-floor trap that had lain hidden for countless centuries!

What Corlyon was doing now was not destruction, but the execution of a cold, precise, long-planned sequence to spring the trap.

Yet seeing the danger coming did not mean he could avert disaster.

His warning had come a fatal instant too late.

CRACK-!!! RRRUMBLE-!!!

Almost before the echoes of Aegon's shout had been swallowed by the abyss, a succession of earth-shattering crashes erupted beneath their feet-no, from within the entire stretch of "wall"-like every bone in some gigantic beast being crushed and snapped at once!

This was no longer a few loose stones slipping free. It was the death cry of the passage's most vital load-bearing structure, collapsing utterly after several of its supports were unlocked at the same time!

It was the apocalyptic sound of rock groaning, breaking, and disintegrating under a weight it could no longer bear!

Aegon felt the footing vanish beneath him, followed by a dizzying plunge into weightlessness!

The massive stone "wall" on which they stood, hundreds of meters long, did not merely collapse in one spot. Pivoting along its central axis like an enormous seesaw whose mechanism had been triggered, the entire structure abruptly tipped downward!

In an instant, the solid stone roadway became a steep slide on which no one could stand, then swiftly turned into a vertical cliff that devoured everything!

Cries of alarm, dying screams, the dull impacts of heavy armor and bodies striking stone, and the thunder of rocks breaking and falling... all those sounds erupted at once and mingled into a deafening symphony of death!

Like ants swept away by an invisible giant hand, like beans spilling from a torn sack, the crowd slid, tumbled, and plunged helplessly from the now-upright "platform," stripped of everything, into the pitch-black cage below-a depth they had known was there, yet still could not fathom.

The enormous slabs collided, crushed against one another, and fractured as they fell, letting out their last brief, desperate cries. Dust and powdered stone billowed out like a heavy fog, instantly obscuring everything.

In that final instant, as he lost his balance completely and was swept toward the darkness amid a chaos of bodies and stone.

Through sheer force of will, Aegon whipped his head around in the spinning world. His gaze, sharp as a tempered blade, fought through the clouds of dust and countless twisting, falling figures to lock onto the beginning of the passage.

Onto the blurred figure standing quietly in that safe area, which seemed to exist in a different world from the source of the catastrophe.

Corlyon stood there, motionless.

Flickering firelight shone from behind him or beside him, barely tracing the outline of his lean, upright figure.

He was as cold as a statue of a god long accustomed to life and death.

There was no wild delight at a successful scheme on his face, no excitement after the slaughter, not even the slightest flicker of emotion.

Only a calm... almost solemn, sunk deep into his bones, as though a ritual had finally been completed.

That calm was more chilling than any vicious smile.

In his eyes, perhaps this was neither a vile betrayal nor a massacre, but merely... the final activation of some ancient device belonging to the Torregar family, long sealed away and waiting for him to complete its last step.

Nothing more.

Cold.

A thick, clinging cold, heavy with the smell of earth and decay, was the first thing Aegon felt as consciousness returned.

Then came agony, as though every bone in his body had been taken apart and thrown back together at random. His left shoulder and back, in particular, burned with pain.

Coughing and choking, he struggled to lift his head from a shallow stretch of equal parts icy standing water and slick mud. Filthy water trickled down his silver-white hair, blurring his vision.

"Cough... ptoo!"

Spitting the muddy water from his mouth, Aegon gasped for breath and barely managed to prop his upper body up on his arms.

Everything before him was dim. Only far, far overhead was there a faint thread of light, tracing the jagged, broken outline at the top of the "wall" from which they had fallen, like a scar slashed across the dark sky.

He was now at the bottom of this enormous cage.

His eyes adjusted slightly to the gloom below.

The place was not entirely lightless. Some of the rock walls seemed coated in an extremely faint, sickly green, mosslike substance, offering illumination that was barely better than nothing.

Aegon surveyed his surroundings.

The first thing he saw was the floor of the cage itself-not the flat stone slabs he had expected, but a thick accumulation of mud, rubble, and... other debris he had no desire to examine closely, piled up over who knew how many years.

Several relatively "fresh" corpses lay scattered nearby in twisted poses. Some were unfortunate souls who had fallen with him this time; others were clearly much older, long since reduced to white bones draped in scraps of cloth.

What Aegon failed to notice was the deeply unnatural behavior of the blood flowing from those "fresher" corpses. As though guided by invisible hands, it defied all reason and flowed upward even from low-lying ground, gathering in the winding channels.

But then another sight made his heart tighten.

Near the bottom of the cage's seemingly seamless walls of massive stone were several enormous, irregular holes.

The largest was wide enough for a carriage to pass through with ease.

The stone around their edges was jagged and covered in huge scrape marks, as though something possessed of terrifying strength had smashed through from outside or bored its way out from within.

The light was too dim to make out anything deep inside the holes. He could only feel gusts blowing from them, carrying a musty smell and an even stronger rank odor.

"Years of neglect can't explain this..." Aegon endured the pain and tried to move closer for a better look, only to find that the slightest movement left him aching everywhere, like a broken bellows coming apart at the seams.

His left leg was especially bad. A piercing stab of pain made him suck in a sharp breath, and he nearly fell back into the muddy water.