Lord of the Foresaken
Chapter 98: COST OF FREEDOM

Chapter 98: COST OF FREEDOM

Reed awoke to the taste of ashes and something metallic—blood, he realized, his own. His consciousness flickered like a dying flame, struggling to coalesce into something whole again. Fragments of memory pierced through the haze: the Watchers disintegrating, The Voice Between’s horrific screams, his own body dissolving as he sealed the breach.

He should be dead.

The ground beneath him was no longer the smooth stone of the chamber but rough soil interspersed with crystalline shards that cut into his palms as he pushed himself up. The sky above—if it could still be called a sky—was a tapestry of fractures, like a mirror shattered but somehow still holding its shape. Through the cracks, impossible colors bled through, colors that shouldn’t exist in any natural spectrum.

"Shia?" His voice was wrong—layered with echoes that weren’t his own, remnants of The Voice Between still lingering within him.

Movement to his right. A figure rose from the ground, and Reed almost didn’t recognize her. Shia’s form remained humanoid, but her skin now rippled with subsurface luminescence, veins of pure dimensional energy pulsing beneath. Her eyes, once amber, now shimmered with the same prismatic quality as the broken sky above.

"We survived," she said, her voice similarly altered—deeper, resonant, as if speaking from multiple throats simultaneously. "Though I’m not certain ’survived’ is the correct term for what’s happened to us."

Reed looked down at his hands. The flesh was intact, but beneath it, darkness swirled—not the chaotic malevolence of The Voice Between, but something more ordered, more deliberate. When he focused, he could make out tiny mathematical patterns within the darkness, remnants of The Configuration he had absorbed and transformed.

"Where are the others?" he asked, suddenly remembering the expedition members who had accompanied them into the heart of this dimensional nightmare.

Shia’s altered features contorted with something like grief. "Scattered. Transformed. Lost." She gestured to their surroundings.

For the first time, Reed took in the full scope of what lay around them. This wasn’t the chamber where they had confronted the Watchers. It wasn’t anywhere he recognized. The landscape was a broken collage of multiple realities—sections of forest grew alongside fragments of desert, patches of ocean suspended in mid-air alongside floating islands of ice. And throughout this impossible geography, Reed could see movement—figures wandering, some clearly human, others... less so.

"The dimensional partition," Reed whispered. "It didn’t just separate our world. It—"

"It shattered everything," Shia finished. "The Watchers were more fundamental to reality’s structure than we understood. Removing them caused a cascade effect across all connected realms."

Reed took an unsteady step forward and nearly collapsed as pain lanced through his body. Not physical pain—something deeper, as if the very concept of his existence was being rejected by this fragmented reality.

Shia caught him, her transformed hands burning cold against his skin. "Your connection to The Voice Between protected you from the worst of it, but you’re still not stable here. None of us are."

"We need to find the others," Reed insisted. "Gather whoever survived, whatever remains of the artifacts, and find our way back to the Nine Domains."

Shia’s expression darkened. "The artifacts..." She reached into the folds of her tattered robes and produced a handful of gleaming shards. What had once been perfect geometric objects of immense power were now nothing more than broken fragments, still humming with residual energy but clearly damaged beyond repair.

"The final configuration overloaded their capacity," she explained. "They were never meant to facilitate the unmaking of cosmic entities."

Reed took one of the fragments, feeling the familiar resonance now muted, like a voice heard underwater. "Can they still help us navigate back?"

"Perhaps," Shia said, uncertainty evident in her many-layered voice. "But first, we must find who remains."

The search was a nightmare that stretched Reed’s already fractured sanity to its limits. They found Kell first, the expedition’s cartographer, crouched beneath a floating island of crystal, muttering equations that wrote themselves in glowing script upon the air around him. His eyes had multiplied—not physically, but perceptually, as if he was now seeing multiple dimensional planes simultaneously.

"The maps are wrong," he babbled when they approached. "All wrong. Too many layers. Too many paths. I can see them all. All the ways home, all the ways to oblivion. They’re the same paths."

Dreia, their combat specialist, they discovered half-merged with a tree that bled a substance too dark to be sap. Only her face remained fully human, the rest of her body gradually transitioning into wood that pulsed with internal light. She recognized them, but spoke only in fragmented sentences, as if her thoughts were being filtered through the alien consciousness of the tree.

"The roots... they reach across... dimensions," she managed to say. "I feel... others... trapped like me... throughout... the shattered lands."

Of the original twenty-seven expedition members, they found only eleven recognizable survivors. Some, like Kell and Dreia, had been transformed but retained their minds. Others had lost pieces of themselves—memories, emotions, even basic human drives. Three were found as nothing more than empty husks, their consciousness apparently stripped away entirely, bodies moving with mindless automation.

Voran, their logistician, had perhaps fared best physically—his body unmarked by transformation—but his mind had been irrevocably altered. He now perceived time non-linearly, experiencing past, present, and potential futures simultaneously. His insights proved invaluable, if disturbing.

"We’ve been gone five years," he announced as they gathered the survivors in what had once been a valley but now curved impossibly upward at both ends, defying gravity. "At least, that’s how time has flowed in the Nine Domains since we activated the partition."

"Five years?" Reed echoed, the implications sinking in. "How can you be certain?"

Voran’s eyes flicked rapidly back and forth, seeing timelines invisible to the others. "I can... trace the threads. The domains we left behind are not the domains we will return to. They’ve changed. Adapted. Fought."

"Fought what?" Shia demanded.

"The incursions," Voran whispered. "The partition wasn’t perfect. Couldn’t be. Small breaches formed. Things slipped through. The Nine Domains have become a battlefield against dimensional invaders."

Reed felt a cold dread settle over him. They had sacrificed everything to protect their world, only to learn that their solution had been imperfect—that their home had spent five years fighting the very threat they had tried to contain.

"We need to return," he said firmly. "Now."

Using the fragmented artifacts, Shia constructed what she called a "dimensional compass"—a crude device that pointed toward the largest concentration of familiar reality patterns. With Voran’s guidance and Reed’s newfound ability to manipulate dimensional energies, they began the arduous journey across the shattered landscape.

The path home was a hellscape of impossible geography and physics. They traversed regions where gravity reversed without warning, where time flowed backwards, where merely looking in certain directions could cause crippling migraines or temporary insanity. Two more of their company were lost along the way—one dissolved into mathematical equations that hung in the air for hours before fading; another simply vanished mid-step, as if the reality they were traversing had rejected their existence entirely.

When they finally reached what Shia identified as a stable breach point—a location where the fabric between dimensions was thin enough to pierce—they were down to nine survivors, each fundamentally changed by their journey.

"This will be painful," Shia warned as she prepared the ritual that would open the way home. "Our bodies and minds have adapted to this fractured reality. Returning to normal dimensional space will be... traumatic."

Reed looked at the sorry remains of their expedition—transformed, traumatized, but somehow still clinging to what made them human. "We’ve endured worse," he said, though he wasn’t entirely sure that was true.

The ritual was agony beyond description. Reed felt as if he were being turned inside out, his altered physiology fighting against the constraints of normal reality. He heard screams—his own, Shia’s, the others’—as they were pulled through the dimensional tear.

Then, mercifully, darkness.

When Reed opened his eyes again, he was lying on solid ground—real ground, earth and stone that obeyed the proper laws of physics. The air smelled of pine and woodsmoke. Familiar stars glittered overhead.

Home. They were home.

Or so he thought, until he pushed himself up and saw the landscape before him.

The forests surrounding Haven Keep had been replaced by fortified walls of bizarre construction—stone interlaced with some crystalline material that glowed with internal light. Watchtowers rose every hundred paces, each topped with devices Reed didn’t recognize—complex mechanical constructs that hummed with energy and swiveled periodically to scan the surroundings.

Beyond the walls, where the city of Haven should have stood, rose structures that defied conventional architecture—buildings that curved inward at impossible angles, bridges that seemed to connect points in space that shouldn’t align, and at the center, a massive tower that pulsed with the same prismatic energy that now flowed through Shia’s veins.

"What happened here?" Kell whispered, his multiple perceptions causing him to sway dizzily as he took in the transformed landscape.

Before anyone could answer, alarms blared from the watchtowers. Lights swiveled to focus on their position, and the air filled with a high-pitched whine as the strange devices powered up.

A voice boomed across the distance, magically amplified and achingly familiar despite its hardened edge.

"Dimensional breach detected! All units to the eastern perimeter! This is not a drill!"

Reed recognized that voice. Lysander—his former apprentice, barely more than a boy when they had left on their expedition. Now commanding with the authority of a seasoned general.

"Wait!" Reed called out, stepping forward with his hands raised. "Lysander! It’s us! We’ve returned!"

The lights intensified, blinding in their focus. Through their glare, Reed could make out figures rushing along the wall—armored soldiers carrying weapons that crackled with energy unlike any conventional magic he had known.

"Hold your positions!" Lysander’s voice commanded again. "Identity verification protocol in effect."

A smaller door in the great wall swung open, and a single figure emerged. As it approached, Reed could see it was indeed Lysander—but changed. His right arm had been replaced by a mechanical construct infused with the same crystalline material as the walls. A jagged scar ran from his temple to his jaw, and his eyes gleamed with an unnatural light.

He stopped twenty paces from them, his expression a mixture of disbelief and suspicion.

"Reed?" he asked, voice barely audible now without the magical amplification. "Shia? Is it really you?"

"It’s us," Reed confirmed. "Or what’s left of us."

Lysander’s enhanced eyes scanned their group, taking in their transformed appearances, the evidence of their ordeal written in their altered flesh. His mechanical arm whirred softly as it adjusted position.

"Five years," he said finally. "Five years while we fought and died against the things that came through the tears in reality. Five years wondering if your sacrifice had been in vain."

"We came back as soon as we could," Shia said, her multi-layered voice causing Lysander to flinch slightly.

"You’ve... changed," he observed needlessly.

"As has everything, it seems," Reed replied, gesturing toward the transformed city behind the walls.

Lysander’s expression hardened. "Necessity. The incursions began almost immediately after you disappeared. We had to adapt or perish." He paused, studying Reed more carefully. "But your return may change everything."

"How so?" Reed asked.

Before Lysander could answer, the ground beneath them trembled. Not the gentle shaking of a minor earthquake, but a deliberate pulse—like something massive stirring deep below.

Lysander’s face drained of color. "It’s happening again. The thing in the deep. It senses you." He turned back toward the wall, shouting orders. "Full alert! Wake the Wardens! Prepare the nullification array!"

"What is it?" Shia demanded, grabbing Lysander’s human arm. "What’s down there?"

The ground shook more violently, and in the distance, Reed could see the central tower’s light intensify to an almost unbearable brightness.

Lysander looked at them, fear and resolve warring in his expression.

"Something came through," he said quietly, "something we couldn’t defeat. We could only contain it beneath the city. It’s been dormant for almost a year now, but since you arrived..." He swallowed hard. "It’s calling a name. Over and over. We can feel it in our minds."

"What name?" Reed asked, though some terrible part of him already knew the answer.

"Yours, Reed," Lysander whispered. "It’s been waiting for you."

The earth split open a hundred yards away, a fissure appearing from nowhere. From within that impossible depth came a sound—not quite a roar, not quite a laugh—that Reed recognized with awful clarity.

The Voice Between had found another way in.

And somehow, impossibly, it had been waiting for his return.