Chapter 1042 (2/2)
RUMBLE.
The ground beneath them shook violently. Small stone skittered off the cliffs and pattered down the steep mountain gorge to their left.
Zagnal chuckled darkly. “It looks like it has begun. Come, we are almost there. And have a care, the reverberations will only become more violent.”
True to Zagnal’s word, those ominous rumblings continued as they climbed up over the rocks to their destination. From time to time, Randidly glanced up and was gratified to see that there was clear air above them. Finally, after a half-day of trekking, they had reached the top. Taking in a deep breath, Randidly clambered up over the last shale scramble and stood with a completely unobstructed view of the surrounding land.
Randidly wasn't sure what he was expecting to see when they mounted the summit. He supposed that the expectations had been pushed upward by the phrase ”Great Rift” but some part of him was so busy coping with the constant visual variations of the stones around him and his own out-of-body situation that he hadn't really thought about what war on this scale would look like. Even the ominous rumbles that seemed to shake his bones failed to convey the sense of scale of what he was about to see.
But it only took one glance for Randidly to be frozen by the vast expanse of space that he could see from the top of the rocky outcropping.
Perhaps it was because Randidly had never visited or traveled through any true mountains that it struck him so violently. He had heard that the recently revealed Mount Olympus in Zone Eleven was large, but he had never seen it. But when Randidly stood atop this summit, it felt like he could see almost infinitely in both directions. The rocks in front of him finally fell away, revealing a steep slope down toward the ground. Although Randidly thought their assent was steep, this drop was even steeper.
Randidly didn’t possess any Stats to augment his vision right now, but every small change in the land seemed completely clear and distinct before his eyes.
Beyond the slope was a rocky expanse of cracked and heavying ground that seemed to pulse slowly up and down like it was breathing. The jagged fault lines expanded and contracted. Barren badlands sprawled outward from the base of the outcropping and in the surrounding area, tumbling helplessly outward.
But whereas the nearby land was relatively gentle in its movements, in the surrounding five miles away from the outcropping, the ground did away with pleasantries. Huge stones undulated like a jump rope. They bucked and heavy like a bull in mating season.
Across that heavying expanse were hundred of black dots. From the height and with the intervening distance, it wasn't possible to distinguish their features, but Randidly was confident that those were the very same images that had flowed silently out of their tents and marched to the borderlands. They seemed like beetles, dragging their bellies across the ground as they walked toward the edge of something. Something that could only be the Great Rift.
But before Randidly's gaze slid outward, it slid to the left and right. Those thousand small bugs became millions as Randidly broadened his view to include the vast line that separated the land from the Great Rift. Randidly seemed to be standing at the center of a long coast. To his left and ring were wings of heaving ground covered in black dotes. There were so many that Randidly couldn’t count them all. The land went on for so long that Randidly couldn’t see the end of the area.
Abruptly, Randidly felt very small.
The further forward one went, the more violent the movements of the ground became. Gravity seemed to fail as you neared the Great Rift, allowing huge boulders to spin lazily in the air. And the Great Rift itself...
It was black. That much was obvious. And empty, too. It was thought some great god had brought a knife and cut away the edge of the world. Randidly wondered what he would have seen if he stood on those heaving grounds below and looked down through the dark fissures. Would they stretch to the center of the planet?
But every second, as Randidly watched in alarm, thin tendrils of ghastly blue energy slithered through the darkness. It only took a few seconds to realize that infinitely large blackness and its blue energy beat in time with the pulsing of the ground. It was exactly that strange energy that seemed to so upset the land.
But Randidly’s eye was caught by those strange blue lines. His gaze narrowed and he examined them carefully. They seemed to branch and shift without warning, but some instinct Randidly possessed said that wasn’t so. There was an inherent pattern in that vast darkness.
Which was when another realization struck Randidly: those blue lines were veins. This great darkness was somehow a living thing.