Unsleeping Patron - Forty-Eight Bitter Roots

Lead and crushed quartz—that was what the forty-eighth herb tasted like.Silas sat on a narrow ledge of basalt three hundred miles north of the Whispering River, four thousand meters above the shale plains. His bare feet dangled over a drop that vanished into the grey, swirling floor of the lower Miasma. In his left hand, he held the root a rubbery, grey stalk no longer than a thumb, covered in fine, hair-like roots that writhed faintly against his palm as if seeking soil.Forty-seven herbs had passed through his stomach over the last three years.He had hunted them using the yellow radar map in his mind, crawling through sulfur vents, climbing shear granite pillars, and diving into freezing subterranean pools. There were black fern-fronds that turned his saliva into liquid lye, cold rubbery pods that froze his intestines into brittle ice, and spiked tubers that exploded inside his belly like jars of hot grease.Each one had torn him open. Forty-seven times his stomach lining had split, forty-seven times his golden heart had ruptured under the raw, unrefined spiritual heat, pouring hot blood into his thoracic cavity until the dark tendrils of his Eldritch Physique stitched the cardiac muscle back together in the dark.He raised the grey stalk to his lips and bit it in half.He didn’t chew. He swallowed the rubbery pulp raw, following it with a gulp of clear meltwater from his stone flask.The reaction was instantaneous.His chest didn’t throb; it detonated. The golden heart behind his ribs already hardened to the density of bronze from thirty months of continuous destruction split wide open down its central axis. A surge of liquid light, hot as melted copper, erupted into his chest, filling his lungs, his throat, and his collarbones with a blinding, suffocating pressure.Silas fell forward onto his hands, his forehead slamming into the basalt ledge.He didn’t vomit. He couldn’t breathe. His teeth clamped together so hard a molar cracked, blood filling his mouth with the sharp, metallic tang of zinc. Inside his chest, the two halves of his ruptured heart were dragged back together by a weave of dark, gelatinous fibers, but as they fused, the amber core didn’t merely heal.It compressed.The golden light shrank from the size of a fist down to a dense, dark-bronze seed no larger than a walnut, pulsing at a slow, heavy fifteen beats a minute.Stage 9 Peak. The absolute ceiling of Sequence 9: Mind-Light.His perception exploded outward. Without raising a hand, without summoning a blade, Silas felt every crag on the cliff face for five hundred yards. He sensed the individual basalt grains beneath his palms, the density of the freezing air currents rising from the valley, and the precise weight of the canvas pack resting against his hip.Then the sky above him shattered.It wasn’t a spatial wall or a Miasma surge. It was a sound a shrill, metallic screech that tore through the upper cloud deck like iron sheets sliding over an anvil.Silas lifted his head, his blood-smeared chin dripping onto the rock.Dropping through the navy blue air at four hundred miles an hour was a shape fifteen meters across. It was a raptor, but its feathers were overlapping plates of dark, razor-sharp steel that clattered together in a deafening, mechanical roar as it plummeted. Worst of all were its heads two long, neckless skulls fitted with serrated iron beaks three yards long, their four yellow eyes locked directly onto his bare shoulders.Silas moved before his brain could form a thought.He didn’t draw his mantis-scythe. He flexed his shoulder blades, driving the spatial crimson heat from his marrow into his back.TEAR.The ten-meter Blood-Wings erupted from his spine in a spray of red foam. Silas threw himself backward off the basalt ledge, plunging upside down into the empty grey void below.The raptor struck the ledge a fraction of a second later.Its twin steel beaks slammed into the granite wall with the force of a siege engine, shattering twenty tons of basalt into a hail of flying stone splinters that rained down into the fog after Silas.Silas twitched his left wing mid-fall.Space buckled. He blinked fifty yards horizontally, reappearing near a vertical chimney of grey shale, but the raptor didn’t lose his line. Its steel wings spread wide, catching the rising thermal draft with a loud CLANG, its double heads whipping around in sync as it dove straight into the chimney after him.The upper head snapped its beak.A wave of compressed air cut through the chimney like a physical blade, clipping the outer edge of Silas’s right blood-wing. The translucent crimson membrane tore open, spilling a shower of red sparks into the fog as Silas lost his balance, tumbling wildly through the narrow rock corridor.He couldn’t blink again the spatial recoil would drive him straight into the rock face at terminal speed.Silas pulled his left wing tight against his ribs, using his Stage 9 Peak Mind-Light to project a four-foot blade of solid, bronze-tinted light from his right forearm. He drove the blade into the vertical shale wall as he fell, sparks showering over his canvas tunic as the golden edge gouged a deep, smoking furrow into the stone, slowing his descent just enough to catch his footing on a narrow outcrop.The raptor was five yards above him, its twin iron beaks opening wide to snip him in two.Silas looked at the wall behind his heel.There, wedged between two massive slabs of ancient granite, was a seam a narrow, shimmering rift no wider than a doorway, rippling with a faint, static distortion that didn’t belong to the Miasma. A hidden sub-spatial realm.The raptor’s right beak slammed down, its serrated edge shearing through the shoulder of Silas’s canvas tunic, cutting three inches into his skin.Silas didn’t strike back. He wrapped his Mind-Light around his own waist, flexed his remaining blood-wing, and drove his entire body backward, diving headfirst into the shimmering spatial seam.CLANG.The raptor’s twin beaks slammed together right against the opening, the force of the impact snapping off two of its iron teeth against the granite frame.Silas hit the ground on the other side.The screech of the raptor vanished instantly, cut off as if a heavy iron vault door had slammed shut.Silas rolled three times across a bed of cool, dry sand, his canvas tunic tearing against the ground, before coming to a rest against a low stone pillar.He lay flat on his back, his chest heaving, his broken shoulder weeping a thin mixture of red blood and dark eldritch fluid onto the pale sand. Above him, there was no grey ceiling of Ash Miasma, no red moon, and no falling dust.The sky inside the hidden realm was a clear, motionless twilight, illuminated by thousands of pale, cold stars that held no heat and no malice.Silas closed his eyes, listening to the slow, fifteen-beat throb of his Stage 9 golden heart, and let the silence of the ancient space wash over his bleeding skin.