The days after the Centurion settled into a rhythm. Sunny counted each one the way his training required, marking the passage of time against his mental calendar.
They hunted and grew stronger, and the routine's predictability became its own form of safety. Nephis in white armor with Sunny at her flank, the Echo carrying Cassie behind them. They moved from one high point to the next, clearing scavengers as they went. Sunny handed over the soul shards and his shadow fragments accumulated in his core without anyone knowing.
The teamwork sharpened until it stopped requiring thought. Sunny would read the terrain through his shadow sense and identify the approach angle, and Nephis would take the engagement position he'd mapped without needing to be told which one it was. The Echo held whatever needed holding. The kills came faster and cleaner each day, and the brief exchanges afterward, the inventory of wounds and shards, became shorter because there was less to report.
The scavengers weren't the only threat in the labyrinth. Centipede creatures lived in the crevices between the coral walls, glistening red things longer than Sunny was tall, with hundreds of scurrying legs and chitin that was easier to pierce than a scavenger's but compensated with horrifying speed. They attacked from above or from the mud, and their bodies contained two internal sacs filled with different oily substances. When mixed, the liquids produced a corrosive black oil that could eat through scavenger carapace in seconds. After the first encounter, Nephis insisted on harvesting the sacs from every centipede they killed. Sunny agreed. Anything that could melt through Awakened chitin and burn was worth carrying, no matter how bad it smelled. The harvesting itself was the worst part, but he'd done worse for less.
Nephis was becoming something difficult to look away from on the battlefield. The Starlight Legion Armor moved with her like a second skin, the white plate catching the grey light of the Forgotten Shore and throwing it back in flashes that the scavengers tracked and flinched from. She fought with a precision that Sunny's training let him appreciate at a technical level and his growing familiarity let him appreciate at a level he didn't have a name for. Every session of exchange-reading drills she ran him through left him a fraction better at holding his commitment, and every fight they survived together left him a fraction less certain about the file the mission occupied in his mind.
He'd started composing debriefs for Doran in his head, a habit that had developed without his permission somewhere in the second week. Target's combat effectiveness continues to increase. Teamwork with the cohort has reached a level of coordination that would require significant disruption to replicate with a new partner. Recommend continued observation. The reports were accurate. They were also, increasingly, a performance he was putting on for himself. Sunny was honest enough to recognize the performance even if he wasn't ready to stop giving it.
Cassie adapted. She couldn't fight and still needed guidance through the labyrinth, but the burden of caring for her shrank with each passing day. She learned to mount and dismount the Echo on her own, and she kept their supplies organized by touch without being asked. She was still vulnerable, but the vulnerability no longer defined her.
Three weeks after the Centurion fight, Sunny started feeling uneasy near sunset.
It took him several days to identify the source. The discomfort appeared in the hours before the sun dropped below the horizon and vanished once it set, and it was subtle enough that he initially dismissed it as fatigue. But it kept returning, and it was getting stronger the further west they traveled.
He mentioned it to the group. Neither Nephis nor Cassie felt anything unusual, which narrowed the source to the one perceptual advantage Sunny had over both of them. His shadow sense.
Cassie suggested he focus on what his shadow sense was actually detecting during those hours, and the answer turned out to be simple once he looked for it. In the time before sunset, when the sun hung low in the western sky, a vast shadow moved through the labyrinth. It was too distant and too enormous to see, but his shadow sense could feel it passing over them the way you could feel the shadow of a cloud even with your eyes closed. Something to the west was tall enough that its shadow stretched across the entire labyrinth at sunset, and they were walking toward it.
When he described it to Cassie, she went still.
Then, she said:
"That is the shadow of the Crimson Spire."
"From my vision. It was as tall as a mountain. When the sun sets, its shadow must fall eastward across everything."
Whatever the Spire was, it sat at the center of everything they'd encountered on the Forgotten Shore. Sunny filed the information and kept the Spire's shadow as a compass, using it to orient west when the labyrinth twisted back on itself.
The Bone Ridge appeared on the horizon a week later.
They spotted it from the top of a coral formation, a pale shape rising above the red walls of the labyrinth with a color that didn't belong. Everything on the Forgotten Shore was either crimson or grey. The Bone Ridge was ivory.
As they drew closer, the shape resolved into what it actually was. The skeletal remains of something enormous lay draped across a mound of coral, its arching spine protruding high above the surrounding labyrinth like a bridge built by something that didn't understand bridges were supposed to connect two things. The creature had been massive in life, large enough that its ribcage formed a natural cathedral and its spine ran for hundreds of meters before curving back into the coral at both ends.
"What was it?" Cassie asked, reading the change in their footsteps as they stopped to stare.
"Something from the dark sea," Nephis said. "Dead a long time."
She was right about the second part. The bones were ancient, bleached by exposure and furred with growths of coral that had been slowly consuming the skeleton for what might have been centuries. The labyrinth wasn't separate from the bones. It grew out of them, crimson tendrils spreading from the marrow like roots from a seed, and the implication of that sat uncomfortably alongside everything else Sunny had observed about the coral.
Whatever they'd been calling coral wasn't coral at all.
They entered through the creature's skull. The upper jaw formed a cavernous arch with teeth the size of Sunny's torso, and beyond it the interior of the spine opened into a long, inclined tunnel wide enough for the Echo to walk through without scraping the walls. Sunny's shadow sense swept the interior and found nothing alive.
They climbed. The tunnel angled upward through the spine's natural curve, pale bone underfoot and strips of grey light falling through the gaps between vertebrae. The Echo's chitin legs produced a sharp clatter against the bone surface that echoed ahead of them, announcing their presence to anything that might be listening. Nothing answered.
The highest point of the spine sat well above the flood line, and they made camp there as the sun began its descent. Through the gaps in the vertebrae, Sunny could see the labyrinth spreading in every direction, red and dense beneath the grey sky.
Except to the west.
To the west, the labyrinth thinned. The coral walls grew lower and further apart, and the crimson color faded to a washed-out pink before giving way to grey. Beyond the thinning coral, something flat and colorless stretched to the horizon. It took Sunny a moment to understand what he was looking at. The Forgotten Shore had not prepared him for the absence of features. Everything since the headless knight statue had been dense and close, walls and creatures in every direction. What lay to the west was the opposite of all that.
A dead, grey plain stretched as far as he could see. Ash-colored earth under an ash-colored sky, with no coral and no walls to hide behind. An enormous dark hill rose from the center of that emptiness, distant but unmistakable, with something massive sitting on top of it. The distance made the details impossible to resolve, but whatever sat on the hill was dark and enormous.
Nephis stood beside him, looking west through the same gap in the bone. Her expression was the blank, evaluating mask she wore in combat.
The grey plain looked like the aftermath of something that had burned so completely it left nothing behind.
"No cover," he said.
"No."
"Whatever's on that hill can see anything crossing the plain."
"Yes."
They stood together in the dying light at the edge of everything they'd learned to navigate. The labyrinth was behind them, and ahead lay open ground with whatever waited on the hill.
Cassie's vision had shown them a castle full of people, with laughter and safety behind its walls. Getting there meant crossing that plain, and the plain offered nothing to hide behind.
Sunny thought about the bone-scythe creatures they'd watched carrying soul shards west, moving with the deliberate purpose of something completing a task. Whatever commanded them was strong enough that it didn't need to collect the shards itself.
Whatever sat on that hill was not something they could fight.
"We'll figure it out," Nephis said.
Sunny looked at her. The white armor caught the last of the sunset and held it, and for a moment she looked like the knight whose statue they'd slept on in their first week, carved from something harder than the world around her.
"Yes," he said. "We will."
They retreated into the spine and made camp for the night. The dark water rose and swallowed the labyrinth below, and the bones around them creaked with the pressure of the tide. Sunny lay in the dark listening to the sea and thought about boundaries.
The labyrinth had been difficult, but it had also been containable. The walls constrained the threats as much as they constrained him, and his shadow sense could map the passages with enough detail to keep them alive. The grey plain offered no such constraints. Out there, the rules would be different.
He closed his eyes and slept, tomorrow they would cross into the unknown, and sleep was a resource he couldn't afford to waste.