SINEUS: Forbidden Truth

But there was nowhere to turn. The black flood was pouring down the slopes behind them as well, cutting off their retreat. The two silent guides drew their swords, their blank faces for the first time showing a flicker of something. Not fear. Resignation. They had seen this before.

“Knyaz, to me!” Fedor shouted. He spurred his horse to Sineus’s side, raising his heavy round shield. The steel glinted in the dim, hazy light. He planted himself between Sineus and the advancing darkness, a bulwark of northern iron.

The tide of shadows did not slow. It was a hundred meters away, then fifty, then ten. It made no sound but that constant, wet tearing, the sound of reality coming apart at the seams.

It hit them.

The darkness was cold, a shocking, absolute cold that stole the breath. But it had no substance. It flowed around Fedor’s shield like water around a stone. It passed through his horse, which screamed and reared. It washed over Sineus, a non-physical wave of pure misery.

For a heartbeat, he was drowning in the memories of a thousand strangers. The pain of a broken leg, the shame of a lie, the grief of a lost child. It was a violation, a force-fed meal of human suffering.

The storm of memory ignored Fedor. It paid no mind to the guides, who stood frozen, their swords held uselessly. It swirled past Alani, who had slumped forward in her saddle, overwhelmed.

It did not pass Sineus.

The liquid shadow converged on him. The tide did not wash over him and move on; it stopped, swirling around him in a tight, suffocating vortex. The screaming faces in the darkness turned toward him. The whispers at the edge of his hearing focused, coalescing into a single, piercing thought that was not his own.

*You.*

The Blight was not attacking him. It was not trying to kill him. It was drawn to him. His sight, his ability to perceive the Pod-sloy without a lens or a blade, made him an anomaly. A light in the endless grey. A point of order in its chaos.

He was a contradiction it could not resolve.

Translocation

The liquid shadow did not pass. It coiled around Sineus, a vortex of pure memory that ignored the world of matter. The cold was absolute, a void where warmth had never been. He was the eye of a storm made of forgotten grief, and the wet tearing sound was inside his skull now. Fedor’s shield was a useless circle of steel, five meters away but in another world. The darkness had swallowed them all.

The screaming faces in the tide pressed close. They were not hostile. They were questioning. The whispers that had been a meaningless hiss at the edge of hearing now focused, coalescing into a query that had no sound. It was the shriek of a system encountering an error it could not compute.

He was a thing that should not be. A man who could see the Pod-sloy, the ghostly layer of the past, yet was made of solid flesh. A living memory and a living man. The Blight, a sea of discarded history, could not categorize him. It could not unmake him, for he was anchored in truth. It could not ignore him, for he was a beacon of order in its chaos. He was a paradox. A stone in the gears of its unmaking engine.

The storm of memory stopped trying to understand him. It simply resolved the contradiction. The Blight chose to move the anomaly instead of trying to break it.

The world twisted. It was not a movement through space, but a folding of it. The ground beneath his horse vanished. The grey light of the valley was gone. There was no up or down, only a nauseating pull in every direction at once – a feeling like falling and being crushed simultaneously. The wet tearing sound became a final, deafening snap. Then, nothing.

The silence was perfect. The motion ceased.

A faint scent of ozone touched the air.

Solid ground slammed into his horse’s hooves. The animal, already panicked, stumbled and fell with a shriek of pain and shattered bone. Sineus was thrown clear, landing hard on a surface that was cold and unyielding. The impact jarred his teeth. He pushed himself up, his hands scraping against jagged, dark metal.

He was on a vast platform of black iron. It was uneven, as if forged from a thousand broken blades fused together. Fedor was nearby, already on his feet, his shield up and his axe in hand. The captain of his guard was pale, but his eyes were scanning for threats. Alani, the guide from the Forest Folk, lay slumped over her own horse’s neck, conscious but barely. The two silent guides from the Golden Road Consortium were gone. The Blight had taken only the three of them.

Sineus got to his feet and walked to the edge of the iron platform. There was no ground below. They were floating in a pocket of stillness carved from chaos. The air was cold and thin, smelling of ozone and hot metal.

All around them, the Blight churned. But this was not the mindless, creeping fog of the borderlands. This was a tamed beast. In the hazy distance, vast tornadoes of whispering shadow writhed in slow, deliberate patterns, contained by some unseen force. They were pillars holding up a sky of grey despair.

This was not a natural phenomenon. This was a prison. A workshop. A place where someone had taken the world’s agony and given it a purpose. The raw power on display was immense, far greater than the petty memory-cutting of nobles in Belogorod or traders on the Golden Road.

Fedor moved to his side, his voice a low growl.

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” Sineus answered, his gaze fixed on the impossible landscape. He thought of the merchant lord, Timur Makhmudov, and his easy promises. The shortcut. The manageable cost.

Alani stirred, pushing herself upright. She looked out at the controlled chaos, her face ashen.

“This place is a wound,” she whispered. “But it is a wound that has been weaponized.”

Sineus did not have an answer. He only knew that the shortcut had led them not to the Sunken Scriptorium of Ur, but to the heart of a power that did not just feed the Blight. It commanded it.

A low grinding sound echoed from the darkness ahead, the protest of metal on metal.

A ramp of black iron lowered from the darkness ahead

The Iron Fortress

A ramp of black iron lowered from the darkness ahead, its movement accompanied by a low grinding sound, the protest of metal on metal. Sineus pushed himself to his feet, his hands scraping against the jagged, uneven surface of the platform. They were floating in a pocket of stillness carved from chaos, a place where someone had taken the world’s agony and given it a purpose. He had to find a way out.

Fedor was already standing, his heavy round shield held ready, his axe in hand. The captain of his guard was pale, but his eyes were sharp, scanning the impossible structure taking shape before them. Alani, the guide from the Forest Folk, pushed herself upright in her saddle, her face ashen. Her horse stood with its head low, trembling. The other horse, Sineus’s own, lay dead, its legs bent at unnatural angles.

The grinding ceased. The ramp connected their floating island of iron to a fortress. It was a mobile, monstrous thing, a structure of dark metal and what looked like bone, fused together in defiance of any sane architecture. Towers rose into the hazy gloom, their silhouettes jagged and wrong. It was not built, but grown from malice.

Rostislav Kurov waited for them at the top of the ramp.

He was a man, tall and broad in the shoulders, encased in armor that seemed to drink the dim light. It was not the polished steel of a northern lord or the etched plate of the Khevsur. It was a dark, matte material, like calcified despair. It had no shine, only an unnerving depth that pulled at the eye.

Sineus focused, his sight pushing past the physical form into the Pod-sloy. The ache behind his eyes sharpened into a spike. The armor was not metal. It was a tapestry of memory, woven from the purest forms of agony and shame. He could see the threads – the terror of the Forest Folk during a blight-scourge, the bitter shame of the Khevsur’s greatest betrayal, the gnawing hunger of a forgotten famine. The man wore the stolen traumas of nations as a shield.

This armor made him invisible to the Blight. He was not an anomaly to it. He was one of its own.

The man on the ramp took a step forward, his movements slow and deliberate. He did not carry a weapon. He did not need one. His presence was a weight, a cold pressure that smothered hope.

“You see things, little prince.”

The voice echoed, seeming to come from the fortress itself rather than the man. It was a low, resonant tone, devoid of warmth. The man knew what Sineus was. The translocation had not been an accident. It had been a capture.

Fedor took a half-step forward, placing himself slightly in front of Sineus. “Who are you?”

Kurov ignored him. His gaze, hidden behind a simple, unadorned helmet, remained fixed on Sineus. The darkness of his armor seemed to deepen, the stolen memories within it stirring like snakes in a pit.

“Such a unique perspective,” the voice continued, a chillingly casual statement in the heart of this impossible place. “A pleasing acquisition.”

The words hung in the cold, thin air. An acquisition. The chillingly casual statement suggested Sineus was not a prisoner to be interrogated, but a resource to be collected.

The grinding of the ramp had ceased. Dust motes, ancient and forgotten, danced in the non-light.

He understood then that he was not a simple captive, but a prize for a power he could not yet see.

A Drop of Blood

The man in the dark armor gave them his back. The words, “a pleasing acquisition,” hung in the cold, thin air, a statement of purpose more chilling than any threat. He did not look back as he walked away, his form swallowed by the gloom of the fortress he commanded. He left them under the watch of his guards.

They were not men. Not in the way Fedor was a man. Four figures, clad in robes the colour of dried blood and ash, stood motionless. Their faces were hidden by deep cowls, leaving only shadow. They held no visible weapons, yet their stillness was a weapon in itself. They were acolytes of this place, extensions of its will.

One of them detached from the group. It moved toward Sineus with a silent, gliding motion, its feet making no sound on the jagged iron platform. In its hand, it held a small device of dark steel and crystal, no larger than a man’s finger. A thin, needle-like stylet protruded from one end. It was not a tool of war, but of cold, sterile purpose.

Fedor shifted his weight, his shield rising a few centimeters. The other three acolytes turned their cowled heads in unison, a single, coordinated movement. They did not draw blades. They simply watched him, and the pressure in the air became a physical weight. Fedor froze, his jaw tight with a warrior’s frustrated rage. He could not fight a wall of silent intent.

The acolyte reached Sineus. It did not speak. It did not wait for permission. It took his left hand, its grip surprisingly strong, and turned it palm up. Sineus watched, his own stillness a match for the creature’s. He saw the worn leather of his glove, a familiar object from a world of sun and wind. A world that now seemed a thousand years away.

The stylet pressed against the tip of his index finger, piercing the glove and the skin beneath. A sharp, clean prick of cold. Nothing more.

A single drop of blood welled up, impossibly red against the grey light and dark metal. The acolyte held the device steady, and the drop was drawn into the crystalline chamber at its heart. The needle retracted with a faint click. The procedure was over.

The acolyte held the vial up to the dim light. Sineus’s blood swirled within, a tiny vortex of life in a cage of cold crystal. The creature seemed to study it for a moment, though with no face, its thoughts were a mystery. It then placed the vial into a padded, cylindrical container of the same dark steel. The container sealed with another soft, final click.