The Coreless Vanguard - Descent

Cloud-Hidden

Valley didn’t break over

Cloud-Hidden

Valley didn’t break over a wide horizon.

It simply turned the damp fog from black to a greasy, boiled-turnip gray.Silas was lacing his left boot near the well when a coarse canvas pack hit him square in the back, nearly knocking him face-first into the cold mud.”Stop dawdling like an old woman at a market stall,” Elder

Scar grunted, stepping out from the shadow of the third stone hut.

He was holding a dead mountain hare by its hind legs, its blood dripping onto his bare, hairy feet. “If you’re going to use up our salt pork and tear up

Mowen’s paper, you can go earn your keep.”Silas picked up the pack.

It was heavy—packed with two loaves of hard, dark rye bread, a small tallow candle, three yards of hemp rope, and a flask of sour plum wine that smelled like kerosene.”Where?” Silas asked.

His voice was hoarse, his broken molar still leaving a faint, dull ache along his jawline whenever he bit down too hard.”The

Abyss,” Cloud-Elder

Orion rasped from the doorway, chewing on a dry piece of rind.

He didn’t look at

Silas; his milky, bloodshot eyes were fixed on the gray fog above the basalt cliffs. “The guild clerks up on the high crest call it a training ground.

We call it a hole where foolish boys go to rot.

The regional ward-line is leaking down there.

The beasts are migrating from the deep ridges.”Orion spat a piece of rind into the weeds.”Five

Tier-Four hides.

Tier-Five core,” the old man grunted. “Don’t drag your boots back through the valley’s ward-gate without ’em.

If you die, leave your coat where the crows can’t mess it up—it’s too cold this winter to waste good wool.”Silas didn’t ask for a map.

He didn’t ask for an escort.

He tucked his hands into his coat pockets, feeling the stiff, burned edges of his father’s journal pages resting flat against his ribs, right over the cold, jagged edge of the

Shard.”I’ll be back in two months,” Silas said.Scar didn’t answer.

He just turned his back, brought his heavy skinning knife down on the hare’s neck with a wet THACK , and started stripping the fur.By noon, the high white towers of the

Order had faded into a distant, tooth-like silhouette against the gray sky behind him.Silas walked alone along the old timber road that snaked south toward the frontier border.

The mountain air was bitter, carrying a sharp, sulfurous tang that got thicker with every mile he covered.

The small farmsteads that usually dotted the valley slopes were gone, replaced by abandoned stone sheep-pens with caved-in roofs and rusted iron gates swinging loose in the wind.He reached the rim of the

Abyss just as the sun began its low, sickly slide toward the western peaks.The world simply stopped.It wasn’t a valley.

It was an ugly, jagged tear in the earth’s crust, three leagues wide and sinking down into a choking, purple-gray haze that hid the bottom entirely.

It looked as if some ancient, iron-clad titan had driven a massive cleaver straight into the granite shelf and pried the stone apart.Silas stopped ten feet from the edge.His skin prickled.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up, reacting to an unnatural, heavy static in the air that tasted like old copper pennies on his tongue.The geography here was wrong.To his right, a cluster of ancient iron-pines didn’t grow upward toward the sun.

They grew sideways, their thick, black trunks twisting like corkscrews out over the void, their heavy needles pointing at a forty-five-degree angle toward the dark floor of the chasm.Silas reached down, picked up a fist-sized chunk of granite, and tossed it over the lip.The stone didn’t drop straight down.

It fell four feet, paused in mid-air as if caught in thick grease, and then drifted sideways in a slow, unnatural arc before accelerating out of sight into the fog.Heavy space, Silas thought.His bad left knee twitched.

He could feel the distortion in his boots—a strange, lopsided pull that tried to drag his weight toward the left whenever he took a step near the edge.

It felt as if the mountain under his feet was leaning into the trench.Deep inside his chest, beneath his linen-wrapped ribs, the

Shard gave a slow, rhythmic pulse.It wasn’t the sharp, agonizing burn he’d felt in the mud of the

Gorge when the wind-wolf attacked.

It was a cold, heavy vibration—like a tuning fork responding to an underwater iron bell.

Shard liked this place.

The strange, distorted energy leaking from the abyss seemed to feed the cold hunger sitting near his heart, settling the constant, gnawing itch in his blood.Silas took a slow breath, his lungs stinging from the sulfur-heavy air.He stepped up to the edge and looked down.A narrow, crumbling donkey-trail was chiseled into the sheer basalt wall, spiraling down into the purple mist.

The stone steps were slick with black moss and wet frost, completely unmaintained, with wide gaps where the cliff face had sheared off into the abyss.Down in that fog, thirty miles long and a thousand feet deep, were things that didn’t care about the

Academy’s geometric wands or

Vane’s silver studs.Silas reached into his coat.

His callused fingers closed around the leather-wrapped handle of his blue-iron dagger.

He felt the eighteen rough, carved nodes under the canvas, feeling the faint, cool vibration resting inside the blue steel.He thought of his father’s jagged handwriting on the burned paper tucked in his pocket: If

I do not return from the northern ridge, it will not be the beasts that finished me.Silas tightened the straps of his canvas pack, adjusted the rough collar of his coat, and stepped off the solid granite rim, setting his boot onto the slick, twisting stairs leading down into the dark.