After what happened, Zario had no choice but to wander aimlessly, at first glance, within the stone walls of this strange settlement, slowly walking along the empty streets and carefully searching for anything that could give him new information, a clue, or at least a hint about the structure of the reality surrounding him.
From time to time, still trying to make use of the only systemic tool available to him, he called upon Lunari again and again, but every question he asked, no matter how direct and specific, was either met with dry refusals or with answers that, in essence, did not clarify anything, but only created even more inconsistencies.
"A personal assistant is also called..." an irritated thought rolled heavily through my mind, "you're no help at all, and all you can do is give confusing answers about this Death Festival..."
And this irritation was not empty.
Because Zario had long ago grasped the main point: the rules provided were not a complete explanation, were not a complete system, did not provide clear boundaries between what was permitted and what was prohibited, but, on the contrary, looked like deliberately vague, unspoken formulations, behind which something far more fundamental was hidden.
As if the rules themselves weren't instructions...
But only a superficial shell that hides the real laws of the game.
*
Zario slowly wandered among the buildings, which until recently had been filled with a dense stream of people hurrying in an unknown direction, but now this entire space, devoid of movement, devoid of life and even the slightest human presence, had turned into a deserted, oppressive scenery, imbued with a strange mysticism, where the only living being was himself - a man who found himself cut off from the world much more than it seemed at first.
Empty passages, open doors, abandoned objects, traces of a hasty departure—all of this created the feeling of a place that had been abandoned not gradually, but suddenly, as if by a single general command, and it was against the backdrop of this dead stillness that Zario began to perceive his own situation in a completely different way.
Lunari did not negotiate.
Or he didn't finish the sentence.
Because it was now becoming clear that its negative effect was not limited to just hearing loss, as had been initially stated, since the problem went much deeper, affecting the very ability to interact with others.
He didn't hear. They didn't understand him.
He couldn't carry on a normal dialogue.
Even his words to others turned into useless movements of the lips, having no effect.
It wasn't just the deprivation of one sense.
It was almost a complete cut-off from communication, as if the game had deliberately closed off all basic forms of human contact to him, leaving him completely isolated within society.
"I don't feel so bad as it is…" the thought sounded dry, almost stubborn, like an attempt to internally establish that even such a limitation was not critical, although deep down he already understood how much this complicated any further strategy.
He continued along the same path he had come from earlier, returning to his starting point not because of hesitation, but because of the need to reconstruct the logical chain of events, because the question of what exactly the villagers were fleeing from still remained the most important of all the unresolved questions.
Zario still couldn't be entirely sure whether they were fleeing from an approaching threat, or, on the contrary, were being drawn somewhere by some force acting ahead, and this uncertainty made the whole situation even stranger, since both options fit equally poorly with what they had already seen.
Step by step, walking along the same empty streets, he finally reached the very house where it all began, and, stopping in front of its open door, for a while he simply looked inside, at this miserable, abandoned room where he had woken up just recently.
A strange feeling slowly rose up inside.
Few events have passed. Time, even less.
But at the same time, it felt as if from the moment he opened his eyes in this world, between that Zario and the present one there had already been a noticeable distance, filled with too many new facts, limitations, and questions to perceive what had happened as an ordinary short period of time.
It depended entirely on Zario himself, on his memory, which was capable of retaining the smallest details with an almost ideal precision, on his sensitivity, which instantly noticed inconsistencies, and on that predatory adaptability, thanks to which even the most absurd world gradually began to unravel before him into understandable elements.
He continued walking further.
To where all the inhabitants had previously fled in disarray.
Only now, when there was no longer a moving crowd around, did Zario begin to truly discern the structure of the village itself, and the picture that opened before his eyes made him pause for a few seconds.
The settlement was not located on a plain.
And not on an ordinary hill.
The entire village was located at the bottom of a huge cliff, as if someone had once carved out a spacious stone pocket at the base of the giant rock and placed residential buildings, a well, and an old bell tower inside it.
A heavy, dark mass of stone loomed over them.
The cliff above blocked out much of the sky, making even the open space feel constricted, and the village itself looked as if it had been deliberately hidden below, beneath this natural rock lid.
A little closer to the center stood a bell tower and a well, and the rest of the houses were crowded around in a disorderly manner, pressed against the base of the cliff, which is why this whole place gave the strange impression not of a settlement, but of a shelter where people are driven, depriving them of a normal view of the outside world.
If you walked further, past the last rows of closely packed houses, the picture became even clearer, because in front of Zario, the cliff itself rose in all its monstrous proportions, the enormous stone mass of which hung over the entire village, blocking out a significant portion of the sky and preventing sunlight from fully reaching the well, the bell tower, and most of the houses, which is why even during the day this place was probably immersed in dim, damp penumbra.
The closer he got to the center of this stone foundation, the more he felt that the village was built not just next to the rock, but literally under its pressure, as if people had been deliberately driven to live in a space where a dead, heavy stone constantly looked down from above.
Passing by a well, which he had not even noticed before, since it seemed to be only part of the general background, Zario finally saw what should be in such a place.
At the very base of the cliff, the entrance to the cave loomed black. Wide. Deep.
So dark that even from the outside it was perceived not as an ordinary depression in the rock, but as an open mouth leading into the unknown.
"What else did I expect from such a place…" the thought flashed through his mind with dry irritation, because now the overall picture was beginning to take shape too logically.
A place like this isn't built for nothing.
And the battle with the monstrous entity, if it was the cause of what was happening, certainly would not have taken place among village houses or in open spaces.
For something like this, you always need a source. A lair.
The darkness from which this something emerges.