It stalked him for two days before he caught on.
The Abyss didn't have night or day. Only dimness and black. Only flickers of false light—bioluminescent moss, veins of pale ore, and occasionally, things pretending to be torches.
That's what tipped Kalem off.
The fire.
It looked like a campfire from a distance, buried deep in a fissure cleft. Flickering orange and blue like surface flame. It even crackled like burning wood.
But Kalem had passed that exact fissure the day before. There was no fire then. No sound. No scent of smoke.
He backed off immediately, hand clutching a blunt short axe—one of his throwaways—while the weapon crate floated behind him in silence. He ducked behind a stone ridge, heart stilling, and listened.
Crack. Crackle. Pop.
Then… a whisper.
It mimicked wind through trees.
But there were no trees.
"Shit," he muttered.
It knew he was here. It had known for a while. But now, it was toying with him. And that made it worse than the others.
Worse than the parasites.
Worse than the husks.
This thing thought.
He called it the Abyss-stalker, for lack of a better name.
Later, when he had time to think—and maybe bleed less—he'd sketch the name on one of the crate's scroll plates. For now, it was just him and the dark and a thing pretending to be fire.
He moved.
Quiet.
He didn't run. Didn't bolt. That's what it wanted. He learned that on the second day when it mimicked Onyx's voice. The sound of hooves echoing behind him. A gentle snort. The rattle of the cart's old reins.
He almost dropped his sword.
It was learning.
Kalem lured it instead.
It was a long game—three hours of slow backtracking through the cracked passage network of the lower chasms. He'd found a bottleneck canyon two ridges east. A dead end for anything too large to maneuver, but plenty of vertical cover for a quick fighter.
He left bait behind. Strips of cloth soaked in his blood. A small ember-glass charm wrapped in moss to give the illusion of light. He carved sigils into the walls with his backup blade—glyphs for reflection, rebound, and resonance.
His last working sound trap.
He hated using it.
But this thing was worse than all the others.
It came at night—if this place had one.
And it came fast.
It didn't walk. It didn't crawl. It glided.
A blur of shifting limbs and plates of bone, like obsidian spider legs fusing with sinew. It shimmered in places—camouflage in action. Its face, if one could call it that, was a distortion—like light bent through cracked glass. It had eyes, but they were scattered across its head, glowing faintly blue.
Kalem sprung the trap as it entered the canyon mouth.
The resonance glyph struck first, rebounding its footsteps back toward it at triple volume. It screeched—a horrid sound, like metal against teeth.
Kalem followed up with a thrown impact axe—non-enchanted, just heavy and fast. It clipped one of the thing's arms and ricocheted, drawing black, oily blood.
The thing reared.
Moved like fluid rage.
Kalem drew the thunder-spear.
He charged—not to impale, but to push. He activated the shock rune on the haft as he swung it like a club. The blast sent both him and the creature crashing into the canyon wall.
A rockslide followed.
It worked better than expected.
Debris pinned one of its legs—if it had legs. Kalem scrambled to the ridge above it, tossing a mine from his crate down toward its side.
The explosion was controlled—enough to gouge a hole in it, not enough to collapse the entire canyon.
The stalker screamed.
It mimicked his voice now.
"Stop—please—Onyx—Kalem—Kalem—Kalem—"
He hesitated.
Just a blink.
And it almost cost him his throat.
The creature shifted form—compressed itself—launched a tendril of muscle straight up the wall. Kalem ducked, barely evading, and rolled into a cut-out alcove behind him.
It followed, smashing through the ridge.
A claw clipped his side—raked through his half-broken armor and left a trail of burning pain.
He screamed.
Then stabbed.
Fire blade, direct to the glowing eye cluster.
The light dimmed.
The creature convulsed.
It didn't die quietly.
It spasmed—twitched and splintered into malformed echoes of itself. Limbs fractured and twisted into new shapes, even in death. As if its body didn't know how to stop hunting.
Kalem lay on his back, panting, watching the thing twitch for several long minutes before it finally fell still.
His side was bleeding freely.
The armor plate was ruined—mangled into useless scrap. He stripped it off, bit down on a cloth strip, and jammed a cauterizing rune against the wound.
The scream echoed up the canyon.
But nothing answered.
Nothing else was nearby.
Not for now.
He stood, slowly. Wiped his blade.
Walked back to the corpse.
The creature's head had partially collapsed, but two of its eyes still glowed—faint, like bioluminescent marbles.
He took them.
Carefully. With tweezers from the crate.
He wrapped them in cloth and sealed them in a rune-locked jar. They might be useful later. Or they might just be trophies. Either way, he wasn't leaving them.
Kalem stood there, shoulder slumped, watching the canyon slowly return to silence.
The voice didn't come back.
For the first time in days, it was truly gone.
Or maybe it was watching.
Waiting.
Kalem leaned against the wall, hand pressed to the fresh scar on his side, and whispered to himself, "One more step."
He didn't know how many were left.
But one more was still possible.