Eli beckoned Nero forward with a graceful gesture, his bronze eyes reflecting sothing that might have been amusent. Or perhaps was it curiosity? With a being like this, Nero found it impossible to tell.
He hesitated for only a mont before following.
What choice did he have?
Running would be pointless. Resisting would be futile, after all.
He stepped toward the door of his old room then froze. A cascade of mories. Old mories. Good and bad mories. They flooded through his mind.
He was still for a mont.
Then he pushed the door open and stepped through.
The transition was imdiate and jarring. In the blink of an eye, he was standing on the familiar looping path of Malady’s Garden. The grey fog surrounded him on all sides, the dead trees reaching upward like skeletal fingers grasping at an invisible sky.
Nero turned back quickly, his heart racing with a sudden desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, he could return to that familiar warmth.
But the house was gone. Only the path remained, stretching in both directions into the perpetual dark.
He let out a long, shaky sigh. Of course it was gone. It had never really been there to begin with. Just another illusion, created from his mind by whatever power this strange entity that called itself Eli commanded.
"Do you miss it?"
Nero spun around to find Eli standing before him on the path. The enigmatic being looked exactly as he had in the room, golden hair catching what little light filtered through the fog, that sa knowing smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Nero didn’t answer the question. Instead, he tried to focus on understanding what he was dealing with. Eli had ntioned eting again in the city. That suggested he wasn’t confined to this strange pocket of reality. He could move freely, perhaps even lived among humans in Liedenstorm.
The Church. That made the most sense. The Church had Templars who wielded strange powers, who served the Grigori. If Eli was one of the Fallen Ones, or perhaps sothing similar, then it stood to reason he would have connections to the Church. Maybe he was even high-ranking within their hierarchy.
For what it was worth thought, it as said that all the Gryghori were dead, and the church was rely using their power to restore order to the world.
How true was that? He wasn’t quite sure...
The thought made Nero’s stomach turn quite a bit regardless.
"You’re thinking quite hard," Eli observed, his tone light. "I can practically see the wheels turning in that head of yours. But I’m afraid you’re working with incomplete information, Nero. The picture you’re painting is only partially correct."
Nero frowned. Could this being read his thoughts?
Or was he simply that transparent in his reactions?
Eli cleared his throat,
"To escape from my maze," he said, gesturing broadly at the fog-shrouded forest around them, "you would indeed need to hold on to your connection to Gungnir. The thread between you and your weapon is strong enough to serve as an anchor. A way to pull yourself through the fog."
He paused, and his smile widened slightly.
"However, before that can work, you’ll need to pass a few tests. Even if you can find the connection to Gungnir, even if your friend successfully traces that thread back to its source, the maze will remain unending if you don’t pass the tests first."
Nero felt his jaw clench.
"What kind of tests?" he asked, his voice carefully neutral.
"Riddles," Eli replied simply.
The word hung in the air between them for a mont.
Before Nero could ask anything further, the ground beneath his feet began to tremble.
There, in the distance to his right, sothing was erging from the fog. At first it appeared to be of a strange shifting texture. Like it did not truly exist. But as it rose higher and higher, it began to take shape.
A monolith.
It was massive, easily thirty feet tall, made of so kind of black stone that seed to absorb what little light touched it. Strange symbols were carved into its surface, glowing with a faint blue luminescence that pulsed in a slow, steady rhythm.
"The riddle," Eli said, drawing Nero’s attention back to him, "is based on the story I told you earlier."
He paused, and in that pause Nero felt the weight of what was coming.
"Who killed the Son of the King?"
At first, the answer seed obvious. Nero opened his mouth to respond, then stopped. His mind raced through the story again, examining each detail.
The Dove was a liar. The Dove had told the other birds that the Raven killed the Son of the King. But if the Dove was a liar, then that statent was a lie. Which ant the Raven didn’t kill the Son of the King.
But the Raven was described as a killer. A beast of predation. If anyone in that story was capable of murder, it was the Raven. So maybe the Dove was telling the truth this one ti, and the Raven really did kill the Son of the King.
Except if the Dove told the truth, then it wasn’t really a liar, was it?
Nero’s head was beginning to hurt.
’This... might be harder than I thought.’
Eli gestured toward the distant monolith.
"Your goal is to make it to that marker alive. And the key to doing that lies in the answer to the riddle."
Nero stared at the monolith, then back at Eli. "What happens if I get the answer wrong?"
Eli’s smile didn’t waver. "Being stuck in the Garden for an Eternity doesn’t seem so bad, does it?"
Nero trembled.
Before he could respond, however, he found that Eli was no longer right in front of him.
He spun around, frantically searching for the strange being.
"Good luck, Nero," Eli’s voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "I do hope you make it. You’re far too interesting to die here."
Nero stood alone on the path, staring at the monolith in the distance. His mind was still turning over the riddle, trying to find the logic hidden within it.
The Dove is a liar. The Raven is a killer. Who killed the Son of the King?
If the Raven did it, the Dove told the truth, which ans the Dove isn’t a liar. If the Raven didn’t do it, then the Dove lied, but then who actually committed the murder? The Dove can’t be the killer because it is against its nature to kill. But it also is not truthful, because it is in its nature to lie.
Nero’s thoughts were interrupted by a sudden realization. Eli had said he needed to make it to the monolith alive. Not that he needed to solve the riddle first. He needed to survive sothing.
The temperature dropped.
It was subtle at first, just a slight chill that made him shiver. But within seconds it had beco noticeably colder, his breath misting in the air before him.
The world seed darker. And through that darkness, Nero began to hear whispers.
Whispers that grew louder, overlapping with itself and becoming more chaotic and frenzied over ti.
His brows furrowed.
It stank of madness.
He turned slowly, his hand instinctively reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there.
What he saw made his blood turn to ice.
An enormous creature was erging from the darkness behind him. It was difficult to make out its exact shape because it seed to be constantly shifting, its form refusing to remain stable. But he could see its eyes. Eyes filled with endless madness.
Chaos incarnate.
It was vile and ugly in a way that defied reason, that went against so fundantal part of his mind simply by existing.
And it was looking directly at him.
Nero felt his legs felt like jelly. Every instinct scread at him to run, to flee, to put as much distance between himself and this thing as physically possible. But he was frozen, paralyzed by the sheer wrongness of what he was witnessing.
The creature took a step forward.
Nero stumbled backward, his paralysis breaking as survival instinct overrode terror.
’I have to move!’
As he turned to run, sothing caught his eye. A faint light in the darkness. It was small, barely larger than a candle fla, but it glowed with a warm radiance that seed to push back the oppressive shadows around it.
A guiding light.
Nero didn’t stop to question it. He didn’t have ti. The creature behind him was moving now, its many limbs carrying it forward with disturbing speed.
The orb of light began to float away from him, moving in the direction of the monolith. It bobbed and weaved through the trees, always staying just far enough ahead that he had to run to keep it in sight.
Nero ran.
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