Chapter 7 | Part 4

The barrier existed at the edge of perception.

Drusniel stood at the cliff’s edge, staring at something his eyes couldn’t quite process. The air ahead was wrong—thicker, somehow, like looking through dirty glass smeared with oil. Colors shifted at the boundary. Blue became purple. Green became something that had no name. Sound faded to nothing and then returned changed, deeper, echoing from directions that shouldn’t exist.

They had walked half a day to reach this place. Through surface forests that Drusniel had never seen in daylight, past ruins that Zaelar refused to explain, along paths that seemed to exist only because the old mage remembered them.

Now Zaelar watched from a safe distance, his pale eyes fixed on the boundary.

“You’ll feel resistance,” he called. “Don’t fight it. Push through. The artifact will hide you from the wards, but you have to do the walking yourself.”

Drusniel looked at the barrier one more time. Beyond it, he could see shapes—suggestions of landscape, hints of a world that didn’t belong in this one. Red light. Black rock. Something vast moving in the distance.

This is it. No going back.

He activated the plate.

The void swallowed him again. That familiar absence, the hole where his presence should be. His stomach lurched—the sensation was unsettling even knowing it was temporary. Like being erased from the world while still existing in it.

He stepped forward.

The barrier was like walking through oil. Thick and resistant and fundamentally wrong. Every instinct screamed at him to turn back, to retreat to solid ground, to stay in a world that made sense. His skin crawled. His teeth ached. Pressure built behind his eyes.

He kept walking.

One step. Two. Three.

Sound changed first. The wind from behind cut off as if a door had closed—not gradually, but instantly, completely. Then a new sound emerged—deeper, wetter, echoing from somewhere below. The crash of waves against something vast. The grinding of water against stone.

Colors shifted. The pale surface sky became something darker, redder. Not sunset—the light itself was different here. Heavier. Older. Light that had existed before there were eyes to see it.

His lungs worked harder. The air was thicker, carrying scents he couldn’t identify. Iron and salt and something like rotting vegetation. Something else beneath that—a sweetness that made his stomach turn.

Then the ground disappeared.

Drusniel plunged.

The Nightmare Sea swallowed him before he could scream.

Cold.

That was the first sensation. Cold so absolute it burned. Cold that reached into his bones and squeezed. Water pressure crushing from all sides—not just weight, but intent. The sea wanted him dead. He could feel it.

Darkness so complete he couldn’t tell up from down. No light penetrated here. No reference points existed. Just water and cold and pressure and the distant sound of his own heartbeat.

Water affinity. Sense the currents.

He forced his panic aside. Buried it beneath the training Zaelar had drilled into him. Reached for the magic—the passive sense that let him feel water. Its presence. Its depth. Its pressure.

There. The pressure was greater below him than above. Down was that way. Which meant up was—

He kicked. His legs moved sluggishly, the cold already numbing his muscles. His lungs burned. He needed air. Needed it now.

Air magic. Don’t command. Suggest.

He gathered the tiny bubbles around him—remnants of surface air trapped in his clothes, clinging to his skin, hiding in the folds of his pack. Drew them together. Compressed them. Created a pocket around his face.

Breathed.

The air was thin. Wrong. It tasted of metal and something that might have been blood. But it was enough. Barely enough.

He kept kicking. The cold clawed at his limbs, trying to freeze him solid. His muscles screamed. His vision sparked with lights that weren’t there—his brain starving, desperate for input.

Something brushed against his leg.

He didn’t look. Didn’t want to know what lived in these waters. Just kicked harder, fought toward the surface, ignored the sensation of something vast moving in the darkness beneath him.

Up. Keep going up. Don’t stop. Don’t think. Just move.

The water lightened. Grey replacing black. He could see shapes now—impossible shapes, things too large to be real, drifting through the depths below. One of them turned toward him. Something that might have been an eye—if eyes could be that size, if eyes could glow with that hungry light—

He didn’t look. Kept kicking. Broke the surface with a gasp that was half-scream.

Air. Real air, heavy and strange but breathable. Drusniel coughed water, fought to stay afloat, tried to orient himself in a sea that didn’t behave like any sea he’d known. Waves tossed him—not waves, something else. Rhythmic disturbances in water that shouldn’t exist. As if something massive was breathing beneath the surface.

Shore. He needed shore.

Sense the water. Feel the currents.

There. The pressure changed ahead—shallower water. Solid ground. Safety.

He swam. Kicked. Dragged himself through waves that fought him with what felt like malicious intent. The cold was fading now, replaced by something warmer. Too warm. The water here was blood-temperature.

Don’t think about why. Don’t think about what lives here. Just swim.

His hands touched rock. Black rock, still warm from whatever fires had formed it. He pulled himself forward, out of the water, onto solid ground.

Collapsed.

Deactivate. The cost builds.

He released the artifact. The void retreated. He was present again, occupying space in a world that didn’t want him.

Drusniel lay on the rocks, gasping, shivering, staring at a sky the color of old blood.

He’d crossed.

He was in Wyrmreach.

End of Chapter 7.4 —> 7.5: The Package: The New World