Free Web NovelChapter 30: The Shard-Valley (1)
Dawn arrived as a sickly, bruised grey, the sun failing to pierce a sky bloated with low-hanging clouds.
Rex stood at the south gate. Rhea was a quiet, steady presence at his right. Ahead, Kress checked the bindings on his bone club, a meager pack of dried rations slung across his scaled chest. The Lizardkin’s slit-pupil eyes were locked on the southern peaks, tracking the jagged silhouettes tearing through the mist.
Boulder-Heart loomed beside the palisade, his granite skin slick with morning condensation. "The Gravelurker does not sprint," the Ash Giant rumbled, his voice scraping like two boulders grinding together. "You have time. But the earth is already softening."
"Four days," Rex said. "Five at the outside."
"And if the mountain keeps you?"
Rex met the giant’s burning-coal eyes. "Then you hold the walls. You, Nara, and Tor. If the palisade breaks, you take the survivors and evacuate north."
Boulder-Heart didn’t blink. "The stone remembers what falls upon it, Fire-Bringer. Come back."
Tor emerged from the fog, the carved mammoth bone swaying at his belt. He looked ragged, having spent another night awake in Alara’s secure hut, but his jaw was set tight. "Fen wanted to march. I ordered him to stay. The dark veins on his chest need time to fade."
"Good," Rex said, adjusting the straps of his pack. "We need his spear arm fresh when this thing breaches the valley."
Tor stepped closer, dropping his voice. "Alara says it’s hungry, Rex. She can feel it chewing through the bedrock. Bring back something that can kill it."
"I will."
Rhea pulled her fur cloak tighter against the morning chill. Her ancient sword rested on her hip, the fire-aspect runes dormant but thrumming with latent heat. "We need to move. If that fog thickens before we hit the tree line, we’ll be climbing blind."
Kress let out a low, clicking hiss. "The mountain does not wait."
They pushed out into the foothills. Behind them, the village slowly woke, a fragile web of forty-seven threads vibrating at the edge of Rex’s consciousness. Through the Blood Bond, he felt the heavy, collective anxiety of his people. And further south, beneath the frozen peaks, he felt the cold, suffocating void of Valthorion’s gaze.
Beneath even that, deep in the crust of the earth, something massive was swimming through the stone.
The clock was ticking.
The ascent was a brutal, lung-burning grind.
The foothills quickly gave way to steep, unforgiving slopes of loose scree and wind-warped pines. By midday, the temperature plummeted, and the oxygen thinned out, leaving Rex gasping despite his enhanced stamina. The mist Kress had warned them about rolled down the peaks, swallowing the world in a suffocating whiteout.
Rex took point, engaging his dragon eyes. The thermal vision stripped away the fog, painting the treacherous path in muted shades of grey and cold blue. Rhea stayed glued to his heels, her balance flawless on the shifting rocks. Kress anchored the rear, his natural camouflage rendering him nearly invisible against the granite.
"What exactly are we looking out for up here?" Rex had asked a few hours into the climb.
"The mountain does not welcome trespassers," Kress had replied, his golden eyes scanning the mist. "It remembers the sky-stone. The anomalies it breeds."
They made camp at nightfall on a narrow shelf of rock beneath a heavy overhang. Beyond their meager shelter, the wind shrieked, driving ice crystals sideways. Rex scraped together a handful of dry, brittle moss and sparked his copper sword against a stone to coax a small, desperate fire to life.
"Tell me about the shamans," Rex asked, passing a water skin to Kress. "The ones who found the crater."
Kress stared into the flames, the firelight catching the sharp angles of his scales. "Three elders of my tribe. They sought the sky-stone when it first struck the earth. They were missing for seven days. When they stumbled back... their eyes were wrong. Not the golden slit of our people. Not the ember-glow of the dragon. Just pale, unblinking white."
"Radiation sickness?" Rex muttered to himself, though the symptoms didn’t quite fit.
"They stopped sleeping," Kress continued softly. "They stopped blinking. They spoke over one another in a language that made our ears bleed, moving like puppets on invisible strings. They begged the tribe to go to the valley. They said the stone was calling."
Rhea shifted closer to Rex, sharing his body heat. "What happened to them?"
"The chieftain sealed the pass," Kress said. "That same night, the three shamans walked back into the blizzard. Unarmed. Unclothed. My people say they went back to the stone. That they are still there, waiting in the dark."
The wind howled, a lonely, hollow sound.
"We aren’t staying long enough to find out," Rex said flatly. "We get in, carve off a piece of the rock, and get out."
Kress met his eyes across the dying fire. "That is what the shamans planned, Fire-Bringer."
Day two stripped away whatever comfort they had left.
The loose scree vanished, replaced by sheer, vertical faces of slick granite. They climbed hand-over-hand, suspended over absolute nothingness. Rhea moved with the lethal grace of an apex predator, and Kress’s heavy claws dug directly into the stone. Rex kept pace, relying on the raw, brute strength of his Stage 2 physiology.
By noon, the air was dangerously thin. The freezing fog clung to their clothes, encrusting their hair and eyelashes with frost. Every breath felt like inhaling shattered glass.
Then, they pulled themselves over a jagged ridge, and the fog simply stopped.
It didn’t fade; it hit an invisible wall and dissolved.
The Shard-Valley lay below them, a violently perfect circle punched into the mountain range. It didn’t look natural. The valley walls were completely vitrified, the stone melted into a smooth, black glass that reflected the grey sky. Despite the freezing altitude, there wasn’t a single flake of snow inside the crater. The air above the valley floor shimmered with intense, rippling heat waves.
And in the dead center, half-buried in the black glass, rested the sky-stone.
It was massive—the size of a small house—and entirely alien. Its surface was an iridescent, deep violet-black, smooth as obsidian but coursing with internal, glowing blue veins. It didn’t just sit there; it pulsed. A slow, rhythmic heartbeat of pure, unadulterated energy.
[Mana Sense: Active]
Rex gasped, nearly dropping to his knees. The sensory overload was catastrophic. The sky-stone was a blinding, roaring sun of raw mana. It drowned out the valley’s ley lines, eclipsed the batteries he had found in the ruin, and made his own mana core feel like a flickering match.
"That’s it," Rex breathed, his eyes watering from the glare.
Kress refused to step over the ridge. His scales had paled to an ashen grey, his golden eyes wide with primal terror. "I go no further. The elders were right. The air here... it tastes like poison."
"Hold the ridge," Rex ordered. "If we aren’t back before the sun dips—"
"I will assume the stone claimed you, and I will leave," Kress finished.
Rhea drew her copper sword. The fire-aspect runes etched into the metal flared blindingly bright, reacting violently to the ambient energy of the crater. "Ready?"
"Not in the slightest."
The heat was suffocating.
Descending into the crater felt like walking into a dry kiln. Sweat poured off Rex’s face, evaporating almost instantly. The black, vitrified glass crunched under their boots, radiating warmth through the thick leather soles.
A sharp chime rang in Rex’s head.
[WARNING: CRITICAL AMBIENT MANA DETECTED.]
[SOURCE: UNKNOWN EXTRATERRESTRIAL ANOMALY.]
[MANA DENSITY: 847 UNITS/M³.]
[RECOMMENDED EXPOSURE LIMIT: 15 MINUTES.]
"We’re on a clock," Rex grunted, pushing against the physical pressure of the air.
"How long?" Rhea asked, her eyes darting around the empty, glass-smooth valley.
"System gives us fifteen minutes before our cells start breaking down."
Rhea’s jaw tightened. "Then walk faster."
Up close, the sky-stone defied logic. It was neither stone nor metal, but some impossible alloy of the two. The blue veins weren’t glowing liquid; they were fractures in reality, bleeding pure, starlight-colored mana into the atmosphere.
Rex raised a hand and pressed his palm flat against the smooth, violet-black surface.
The crater vanished.
He didn’t fall, but he was suddenly untethered. He stood in a boundless void of blinding, kaleidoscopic light. The sky-stone hovered before him, impossibly vast, a cosmic seed adrift in an ocean of stars.
It didn’t speak with words. It spoke in raw, traumatic impressions.
A journey across eons. A desperate launch from a dying world. Drifting through the absolute zero of the void. Crashing into a young, volatile earth before the mountains had even finished forming. Waiting. Sleeping.
Waking.
Rex violently tore his hand away.
He collapsed onto the black glass, coughing violently. Rhea was on her knees beside him, her hands gripping his shoulders, shaking him.
"Rex! Look at me!"
"I’m here," he wheezed, his vision swimming. "I’m here. It’s... it’s a seed, Rhea. It’s not a rock, it’s alive. It came from somewhere else."
"Can we weaponize it?"
