Chapter 969: Into the Abyss
The phone connected before he had fully gathered himself.
“Hello? Calling again?” Garcia’s voice came with an edge of impatience. “If you have something to say, say it quickly. I’m heading out soon.”
Roland shook his head and forced his thoughts into order. “I just finished the book. The content is quite…”
“Frightening, right?” She seemed to have expected exactly this. “That’s the usual reaction, first time through. But it’s fictional. Sleep on it and you’ll feel better.”
“Fictional?” He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Literally.” Laughter crackled over the earpiece. “The Association investigated the volcanic ruins the author mentions in the book and found that the site was swallowed by magma two hundred years ago—an active volcano. It’s never had a major eruption, but it hasn’t been dormant for thousands of years either. So unless the author could replay the past, live for two centuries, and also endure extreme heat and thick volcanic smoke, he made it up.”
The answer surprised him. He let a moment pass before he said, “So… all of it was invented?”
“Could be true, could be false. I’ve never had much interest in archaeology. Master once said that if the author hadn’t been wearing martialist robes and hadn’t died in the Association’s own library, the book wouldn’t even have been catalogued.” A pause. “Anyway, there are all sorts of rumors around it. Are you finished? I’m hanging up.”
“Wait—” He caught himself. “After you brought the book back this time—did you read it again?”
He had wanted to ask about the note. He stopped himself.
“I flipped through a few pages on the journey back. Why?”
“No reason. Just wondering.”
Click. Garcia hung up.
A second later, he heard her apartment door close through the wall.
Roland exhaled. Going at it sideways like that—asking vague questions, hoping she’d fill the gap—only produced irritation.
He thought it through. The book, Raison d’être, was only half-written; the red note would most likely have been tucked between the final blank pages. Even a thorough reading might miss it. Garcia had been on a shuttle back from the Association; she’d said herself she only flipped through a few pages. There was no way to determine from her answer alone whether she had seen the note.
No—it was a definite no.
If she had seen it, Garcia would not have been indifferent. That wasn’t her character.
Which meant the note was either a prank or a message. He strongly preferred the former.
The alternative was simply too strange.
Who was the note for? Anyone who found it, or a specific person? Rationally, he leaned toward the latter. Raison d’être was not an obscure text—most martialists in the Association had read it. The note had almost certainly been there for years. For it to remain hidden through that many readings was nearly impossible. So it had probably been inserted recently. Deliberately. With a particular reader in mind.
That logic made the cold feeling worse.
It meant the Dream World—this fabricated space that existed inside Zero’s mind—had been noticed by someone. It was like being in a dream when a figure in the dream turns around and gives you a knowing smile.
Roland pressed both palms to his cheeks and held the thought at arm’s length. There was nothing to be afraid of. Even if someone inside this world had realized what it was, the moment he left, time here stopped. Who could threaten him from within?
Besides, the note only promised to wait—it did not move first. That was telling.
The location of Rose Café and the meaning of “divine meaning” were questions for the Taquila witches.
He still had other work today.
He checked the wall clock, took the prepared key from his bedroom, locked up the apartment, and went downstairs.
He had been laying groundwork for months—duplicates of every key in the building, plus an unlocking tool ordered online, all of it accumulated since the Taquila witches first arrived. Since he was the only person who could perceive the Gate of Memory, if a door was locked, he had no choice but to handle it himself. The unification of Graycastle had delayed this investigation far longer than he’d wanted.
The fifth floor. Room No. 0510.
The corridor was quiet in the late-autumn afternoon. Sunlight lay warm and heavy through the windows, the kind of light that made the whole building feel suspended in amber. Most people would be napping.
He slid the key into the lock and turned it gently.
The door swung open.
The smell hit him first—a dense, layered odor that the Dream World had not bothered to soften. The demon’s particular scent, half-masked by an excessive application of perfume, filled the entryway like a closed drawer full of old cloth. Roland held his breath for a moment, then breathed through it.
He moved quickly through the apartment, checking each room. Empty. He locked the door behind him, shouldered his backpack, and walked to the storage room at the end of the corridor.
One of the few iron doors still locked.
Experience had already shown him that the locks of this world could not withstand simple physics. He took out the hydraulic bolt-cutter and applied it. The lock broke in silence, two clean pieces.
He swallowed once and pushed the heavy door open.
The scene beyond it stopped him completely.
He seemed to be standing at the lip of a circular cliff—more than ten kilometers across, so wide he couldn’t see the opposite edge. The abyss below was not darkness but light: a lake of Red Mist, dazzling and deep, churning slowly like molten crystal. Hundreds of meters below the cliff edge, the mist glowed with its own intensity. When the winds shifted, columns of haze rose from the depths and climbed straight up past him like pillars of red smoke, dissolving only far above into the thin atmospheric layer.
Roland felt like he was standing on the surface of the sun.
And around the circular cliff—towering on every side—stood black stone buildings. Tower after tower, most of them slender and tapering, leaning slightly outward from the cliff walls like structures designed to defy their own weight. The Red Mist swallowed the sunlight entirely; the world here was lit only by the glow from below. When the mist surged, the towers’ reflections appeared briefly in the liquid red surface of the lake, then vanished again.
A dense stone forest above a burning sea.
He stood there for a moment, feeling the scale of it settle into him.
This was not the demon city Leaf had glimpsed in her visions. No great Obelisk dominated the skyline—no core tower built from God’s Stone ore, capable of generating Red Mist on its own. But there were too many towers here to take in at once, and some of them rose above the clifftop itself, jutting over the abyss like impossible balconies.
How did they build this?
And if this isn’t the city Leaf described—where is that one?
Somewhere more distant, perhaps. The rumored birthplace of the demons.
He had barely taken a hundred steps toward the edge of the cliff when every muscle in his body locked.
A patrol of demons came around the corner.
Mad Demons—he recognized the bone armor and short spears. The two at the front wore gloves, their frames broad enough to nearly block the path. Six of them in total. Less than ten steps away.
Living creatures. Inside a memory fragment.
He had wandered through the Hermes Cathedral and encountered no one—no Knight of Judgment, no priest. The spaces in Zero’s memories had been empty stages, preserved moments. This was different.
Do I run?
He had seen what Mad Demons could do with a thrown spear. Running was a dead end.
Fight?
The Dream World’s power still ran through him—he was stronger than an ordinary person. But six Mad Demons, including one Ironhand with an electrical shock capability that was the nemesis of close combat? Against those odds, the outcome was not in doubt.
He stood his ground. The demons walked straight through him.
Not past him. Through him.
Roland turned, reaching out, and pressed two fingers to the arm of the nearest Mad Demon. His fingertips passed through the skin without any sensation—like touching a reflection in water.
He crouched and pressed his palm to the black soil of the ground. Damp. Solid. The Red Mist had corroded it to a dark, rich earth, and he could feel the moisture clearly.
He withdrew his hand and considered.
The intensity of a devoured person’s resistance, then, shaped the scope and texture of the memory fragment—determined what was preserved and how. This demon’s memory clearly contained far more than anything Zero had left behind. The figures in the scene were real enough to walk, to carry weapons—but they weren’t aware of him. Couldn’t be. They were echoes.
Two questions opened up from that conclusion.
The first: the church warrior who had sacrificed himself to save Zero. What had his resistance done to the fragments he left? Could the dead be spoken to, once you were inside their memory?
The second: Zero herself—how strong had her hatred been, her refusal? It had been strong enough to produce a more vivid world than a demon lord’s. He felt a sudden, absurd urge to go back to apartment No. 0825 and lift the little girl up and swat her for the inconvenience.
He put both thoughts away and walked faster toward the pit.
Just as he’d expected, the cliff edge was lined with ramps and stone staircases descending into the abyss. Some of them were wide enough for a carriage, coated in smooth black stone that had been laid with the same precision as Neverwinter’s best roads. The scale grew more staggering the deeper he went.
Even if the upper half of the Western Region’s Great Snow Mountain were shaved flat, it would not have matched this width. Standing on the ramp with nothing but the Red Mist lake below, Roland felt the particular smallness that comes not from a single overwhelming thing but from being surrounded on all sides by things that simply exceed comprehension. The turbulent red surface, the towers vanishing and reappearing in the haze—it made the whole world feel like it had been reduced to this one place.
How long did it take to dig this?
How many centuries of labor to coat these road surfaces with black stone, to build carriage-accessible ramps from the clifftop to the pit floor?
If this was the measure of the demons’ technical capacity and social organization, they were a far more formidable enemy than any field encounter had suggested. The four kingdoms could not win the Battle of Divine Will by luck or desperation alone. It would take everything—total and coordinated effort—to have any chance at all.
As he descended, more demons appeared on the ramps. Most were unarmed—wearing skins or rough robes, varied in form and size in ways that made it hard to believe they were all one species. Short, massively built. Tall and willowy. Some with heavy armor-like plating on their skulls. Some with almost nothing.
Pasha’s reports had mentioned that the Union once captured demons with no magical ability and no combat training. Whether they were part of the same civilization or a slave race had been left unresolved. But looking at the spontaneous movement around him—no supervisors, no obvious hierarchy enforcing order—Roland leaned toward the former. This looked like a city going about its day, not a camp with guards.
The division between types was more absolute than anything among humanity’s witches and ordinary people. Not just a difference of degree—a difference of form. Born differently, perhaps from different origins entirely, with no path between one category and the next.
Do they have masculine and feminine forms?
Is their reproduction comparable to ours at all?
He was still turning those questions over when he reached the pit floor and finally saw what had been causing the flickering light from above.
A stone bridge, slender and somehow unsupported, stretched from the cliff base to a circular island suspended in the middle of the lake. There was nothing beneath the island—nothing visible holding it up. Bonfires burned around its perimeter, their flames climbing ten meters when the Red Mist surged, then dropping again in the subsiding air. That was what had caught his eye from the clifftop: the irregular pulse of fire answering the pulse of the mist.
The island was roughly the size of Neverwinter’s central square.
And everywhere around him—on the ramps cut into the cliff walls, on the platforms, in the mouths of caves—tens of thousands of demons were gathered. Colored pennants snapped in the wind. Howls and cries in an unfamiliar register filled the air until they nearly matched the roar of the airflow in the hole itself.
Roland blinked.
Were the demons carrying out a ceremony?