The Old Man's eyes darkened, swallowing what little light remained in the temple.
Around him, the shadows detached from the walls. They didn't just stretch; they woke up. Like starving, formless beasts, they crawled up the ruined pillars and spread across the stone floor, reaching toward Ryan with grasping, ink-black fingers.
"You ask for entirely too much, boy."
The voice no longer belonged to a tired monk. It was seismic. It carried the crushing weight of a thousand dead empires. Dark energy radiated from him like heat off a furnace, pressing violently against Ryan's spirit-form. It was designed to make him feel small. An insect standing before a mountain.
Ryan didn't take a single step back.
He stepped into the pressure.
"You gave me the Eye," Ryan said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "The Eye accepted me. I know you could erase me right now. But if you do... you start over. Another thousand years in the dark."
The shadows froze.
For a long, suffocating moment, the ancient entity and the broken boy simply stared at each other.
Slowly, the Old Man's fists uncurled. The shadows retreated, slithering back to the corners of the temple.
"You asked who I am," the Old Man rasped, the hostility fading into a grudging respect. "I am the Traveler of Darkness. I have walked this earth since before men built walls." He crossed his scarred arms. "And you asked of your parents. You asked if their souls remain."
Ryan held his breath.
"No," the Traveler said quietly. "The spirit is tethered to the flesh. When the flesh fails, Azrael reaps. If a spirit is violently strong, it may resist—it may twist into a curse, a wraith, a beast of the woods. But your parents?" He shook his head. "They gave their lives willingly. Their souls are at peace, boy. They have crossed the veil. Even the Eye cannot reach them."
Ryan stood perfectly still.
Run. His mother's voice echoed in his memory.
He saw his father standing before the shield wall, a mountain of meat and arrows.
Gone. Truly, permanently gone.
Ryan took a slow, phantom breath. The green light in his left eye flared.
"I understand," Ryan said. He looked up, his gaze locking with the Traveler's. "So here are my terms. I will bring you the corpses of the twelve gods. But their souls..."
Ryan pointed a translucent finger at his own chest.
"...are mine."
The Traveler of Darkness stared at him, genuinely stunned.
"You want to devour the souls of the divine?" The ancient warrior barked a harsh, disbelieving laugh. "You will already have a thousand mortal voices screaming in your skull. If you absorb a god, you will go completely, violently mad before you ever reach the second."
"That is my risk," Ryan said coldly. "Not yours."
The Traveler studied the boy. The madness. The absolute, suicidal conviction.
Slowly, the ancient man reached into his heavy robes. He produced a piece of parchment—yellowed, crumbling, covered in shifting, illegible runes.
"A soul pact," the Traveler whispered. "Touch the parchment. The contract is sealed with your spirit."
Ryan didn't hesitate. He pressed his thumb to the center of the page.
The parchment didn't catch fire. It ignited with a freezing, blinding green light. The ancient runes physically lifted off the page, swirling through the air like ash before slamming violently into Ryan's chest. The magic sank deep into his spiritual core, a heavy, freezing anchor carving the promise into his existence.
The Traveler of Darkness smiled. It was the smile of a predator whose trap had finally sprung.
"Then we are done."
Behind Ryan, the fabric of the temple tore open. A swirling, abyssal black hole expanded, roaring with a vacuum of hungry wind.
Before Ryan could brace himself, the void pulled. His spirit was violently sucked backward, ripped from the temple, away from the Traveler, and swallowed by the dark.
He fell.
And fell.
He woke to agony.
Living, breathing, flesh-tearing agony.
Ryan gasped, choking on the overwhelming stench of rotting meat and dried blood. He was back in his physical body. Back in the cave of the dead.
Every nerve in his body screamed. The arrows were still buried in his chest, grinding against his ribs with every shallow breath. But beneath the suffocating pain, something else pulsed. A freezing, ancient power rested behind his left eye. Waiting.
A shadow moved at the cave entrance.
Ryan's eyes—one brown, one glowing a faint, necrotic green—snapped toward the light.
A wolf.
It was a monstrous beast, native to the deep wild lands. Its fur was thick and matted with gray snow. Its yellow eyes scanned the darkness. It had smelled the slaughter. It had come for the feast.
And now, it smelled fresh blood.
Ryan didn't move. He forced his shattered body to go completely limp, sinking deeper into the pile of cold corpses beneath him. He didn't breathe.
The massive wolf padded into the cave, its claws clicking softly against the stone. It sniffed the air, its snout twitching. It bypassed a dead villager, its yellow eyes locking onto Ryan.
It crept closer.
Ryan's lungs burned. The arrows in his chest shifted painfully.
The wolf stopped right beside him. Hot, rancid breath washed over Ryan's cheek. It was studying him. Deciding if this meat was dead, or just dying.
Slowly, agonizingly, Ryan's right fingers closed around the wooden shaft of an arrow buried deep in his own shoulder.
The wolf opened its jaws, aiming straight for the soft flesh of Ryan's throat.
Ryan moved.
With a guttural roar, he ripped the arrow violently from his own flesh. The pain was blinding, white-hot, and paralyzing, but he forced his arm upward. He drove the iron broadhead directly up into the soft underside of the wolf's jaw.
The beast shrieked—a high, terrible sound. It thrashed backward, its heavy claws raking violently across Ryan's face, tearing three deep, bleeding gashes from his forehead to his chin.
Blood blinded him, but Ryan didn't let go.
The wolf stumbled back, the arrow lodged deep in its throat, choking on its own blood. But it wasn't dead. Its yellow eyes burned with feral rage.
Ryan forced himself to stand. His broken ribs ground together. Blood poured down his face, soaking his tunic. But he stood. He was the son of the giant. He would not die in the dirt.
The wolf charged.
Ryan didn't try to dodge. He simply let his legs give out. He dropped flat onto the pile of corpses.
The massive wolf sailed over him, its momentum carrying it past. Before it could land, Ryan twisted his body, grabbed the wooden shaft still sticking from its throat, and yanked downward with everything he had.
The wolf crashed brutally into the cavern wall.
Ryan was on it instantly. He ripped a second arrow from his own ribs—ignoring the sickening pop of cartilage—and drove the bloody iron spike directly into the base of the wolf's skull.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The massive beast convulsed, let out a wet rattle, and went entirely still.
Ryan collapsed backward onto the cold stone, his chest heaving, his vision blackening around the edges. He was bleeding out.
Then, the voice echoed in his skull. Cold. Ancient.
"You have claimed your first soul."
Ryan's left eye flared. A thick, swirling green mist began to rise from the wolf's massive corpse. It drifted through the freezing air and sank directly into Ryan's chest.
"This beast possessed a natural lifespan of twenty years," the Eye whispered in his mind. "It lived for eight. You have harvested the remaining twelve."
Ryan gasped as the green energy flooded his veins.
"Flesh requires payment," the Eye continued calmly. "Your wounds are fatal. To knit the bone and seal the flesh, I consume five years of the beast's life."
The pain suddenly vanished. Ryan watched in shock as the deep, bleeding claw marks on his face rapidly stitched themselves together, leaving nothing but pale scars. His ribs cracked back into place. The remaining arrowheads in his body slowly pushed themselves backward, sliding out of his skin and clattering to the cave floor.
"You retain seven years. They are added to your own. And now... you will witness."
The cave vanished.
Ryan was running.
He was low to the ground. Four paws pounding against heavy snow. The wind in his fur. The intoxicating smell of fear ahead of him. He was hunting a deer with his pack, his heart beating with pure, instinctual joy.
Flash.
He was a pup. Tumbling in the warm dirt of a den beneath a massive pine root. His mother's heavy tongue cleaning his ears. The scent of milk and safety.
Flash.
Fire. Shouting men. Spears. The smell of burning fur. Running into the dark, alone. The gnawing, agonizing ache of starvation in his belly. The desperate, lonely years in the freezing woods.
Flash.
The scent of blood. The dark cave. The boy in the pile of meat. The sudden, piercing pain in his throat. The fading light.
Then... absolute silence.
Ryan snapped back to reality, gasping for air on the cold stone floor. He looked at the dead wolf, a profound, heavy sadness settling over him. He understood it perfectly. Its fear. Its hunger.
He slowly pushed himself to his feet, his body completely whole, his left eye glowing brightly in the dark.