Chapter 92: The Weight of Silence
The temple did not roar or crumble.
It simply… opened.
The obsidian gate before them gave a low sigh as its seams dissolved into mist, revealing the spiraling slope of black stone they had descended what felt like a lifetime ago. No monsters waited. No flames licked at their heels. The trial was truly over.
Lira broke the silence. "That's it?"
Isaac stepped past the threshold. "That's all it needed to be."
They climbed slowly, the path somehow longer on the way up. The oppressive weight that had filled the temple—the simmering wrath in the air—was gone. In its place was something unfamiliar:
Quiet.
No wind. No tension.
Just the sound of their footsteps and breath.
When they finally reached the surface, the light of the Velkarth Basin struck their eyes like a revelation.
But something was off.
Lira squinted across the cracked ridges and shale fields. "Wait… weren't those hills lower?"
Isaac followed her gaze.
She was right.
The terrain had shifted. Slightly. Trees now lined one crest where there had been nothing but dust. The shadows cast by the rocks were longer, harsher. And the sun hung just a little too low in the sky.
"…We've been gone longer than we think," Isaac murmured.
Lira checked her timepiece crystal, tapped it once, frowned. "Dead. It was working when we entered."
Isaac looked back over his shoulder at the ruined slope behind them. It had sealed itself again—smooth stone, no sign of an entrance.
No proof of what they had endured.
No witnesses.
"Let's head back," he said quietly.
They walked for hours beneath the heat, silence trailing them like a second shadow. They passed other adventuring teams once or twice, but no one called out. No one waved.
Isaac didn't mind.
Lira looked around as they crested a final rise overlooking the outer roads. "Think anyone missed us?"
Isaac smirked faintly. "Renall probably took a bet on how long we'd last."
The walls of Velkarth rose ahead, jagged and familiar. And yet, stepping through them felt strange. The gate guards barely glanced up—they had no reason to. To them, it was just two wanderers returning from an unsuccessful ruin dive.
But at the Shattered Tooth, the atmosphere shifted.
Renall was mid-conversation with a local smuggler when he spotted them entering the tavern. He blinked, froze, and slowly stood.
"Well," he said after a long pause. "You're either hallucinations or somehow alive."
Lira gave him a tired thumbs-up and collapsed into a chair. "Mostly the second one."
Renall stared at Isaac. "The Twelve-Step Vault?"
"Didn't find it," Isaac lied easily. "Just an old ruin. Mostly broken."
Renall didn't press. He narrowed his eyes slightly, as if sensing the lie but knowing better than to dig.
Instead, he asked, "Bring anything back?"
Isaac reached into his coat and conjured a single phantom replica—the obsidian blade that had belonged to one of the elite temple defenders. Not flashy. Not named. But etched with runes that didn't exist in any known relic registry.
Renall blinked once. Then again. "That's… new."
Isaac dispelled it before the tavern could notice. "Don't worry. I'm not flooding the black market."
Renall grinned. "Just keeping things sharp?"
"Something like that."
By evening, the word had begun to circulate—quietly, in whispers.
That Isaac and Lira had returned from the basin.
That they came back unscathed.
That they weren't talking about what they found.
And that was somehow more terrifying than if they had.