The cave swallowed the sound, leaving only the faint, terrible creak of the rope.
The team remained frozen, shock giving way to focused horror as they registered the body's desecration.
Levy fought back a wave of nausea, forcing herself to examine the corpse's blackened skin. The veins pulsed with a faint, residual light—the curse was still active, consuming its host even in death.
Cana's breath hitched. She scattered a handful of cards with trembling fingers, watching them fall in chaotic, contradictory patterns. "The magical center is *unstable*," she whispered. "And the source is right here. Right here."
Yume's face was a mask of cold fury. He stepped forward, analyzing—
The corpse began to swing.
Slowly at first, then with unnatural, increasing momentum. The frayed rope snapped with a sharp thwack! that echoed through the stone chamber. The body crashed to the slick rock floor, skull shattering against stone.
Then the broken head lifted, levitating upward on a column of dark, sickening energy.
A voice filled the cave—not spoken, but pressed into their minds like needles scraping against bone. Each word dripped with malice, ancient and patient and hungry.
"Ah... the little rescuers arrive to find their stage empty. How delicious."
The corpse's flesh began to melt, sliding off in wet, viscous sheets that hissed as they struck stone.
"Do you hear them screaming, mages? Every root. Every seed. Every precious bean—all of them are drinking now. Drinking deep of what I've sown."
The skull's jaw cracked open wider than any human mouth should move.
"And when your precious villagers take their morning cup... when they smile and sip and savor... they'll be mine. Every. Single. One."
Laughter—wet, gurgling, infinite—echoed as the skull dissolved into the black pool of corruption. The liquid spread across the floor like grasping fingers.
"Thank you for witnessing the birth. Now... join the soil."
The cave walls flared bright red.
Yume's eyes widened. Trap.
He didn't waste a second.
"DOWN! NOW!"
He slammed his fists together. His eight Pandora orbs shot outward, expanding and interlocking in a perfect sphere around the team just as—
A deafening BOOM ripped through the mountain.
The world became fire and thunder and crushing stone. The entire cave system didn't just collapse—it imploded, dragged inward by a vortex of corrupted magic that screamed as it consumed everything. Walls shattered. The ceiling came down in massive slabs. The entrance vanished in an avalanche of pulverized rock.
And then—
Silence.
---
Inside the sphere, Levy gasped for air that wouldn't come.
The darkness outside the Pandora orbs wasn't the darkness of collapsed stone. It was absolute. Suffocating. Wrong.
Cana's cards were glowing frantically, cycling through every suit in panicked succession. "What—what the hell—"
"Holdon," Yume commanded, his voice tight with focus.
The sphere began to move. Up, he thought. Up.
They rose—
—and broke through into air.
But not the mountain air of Serenity Creek.
The sky above them was the color of old bruises, purple-black and swollen with storms that never broke. The sphere hovered twenty feet above cracked, dead earth.
Below them stretched a graveyard.
Not a village graveyard. Not even a city's cemetery.
An endless graveyard.
Thousands upon thousands of graves stretched to the horizon in every direction—crooked headstones jutting from the ground like broken teeth. Some markers were fresh. Others were ancient, worn smooth by centuries of wind that shouldn't exist in a place without weather.
And every single grave was open.
Empty holes gaped in the earth, dirt piled beside them in neat mounds, as if something had climbed out. Or been pulled free.
Levy's voice cracked. "Where... where are we?"
Yume's jaw was set, his eyes scanning the impossible landscape. His Pandora orbs hummed with barely restrained power. "I don't know."
Cana pulled a card—the Tower, reversed—and her hand started shaking. "Guys. My cards are telling me we're not... we're not anywhere. This place doesn't exist on any map. Doesn't exist in any world I can read."
A wind picked up across the graveyard. It carried with it the smell of turned earth and something else—something sweet and rotten, like overripe fruit left to ferment.
And then they heard it.
Distant at first. Then closer.
Singing.
A child's voice, high and clear, singing a lullaby in a language none of them recognized. The melody was beautiful and wrong, each note hanging in the air just slightly too long.
The singing was coming from deeper in the graveyard.
From between the empty graves, a figure emerged.
Small. Walking with an uneven gait.
Coming closer.
Yume's hands clenched. His orbs shifted position, ready to transform into weapons at a thought. "Stay behind me."
The figure stepped into clearer view.
It was a little girl. Perhaps seven or eight years old. Her dress was old-fashioned, Victorian perhaps, and pristine white despite the dirt surrounding her. Her hair was long and black, covering her face as she walked.
She was still singing.
And she was dragging something behind her.
A rope.
At the end of the rope was a coffin, scraping across the broken earth with a sound like nails on stone.
The girl stopped fifty feet away.
The singing stopped.
Slowly—impossibly slowly—she raised her head.
Where her face should have been, there was only darkness. Not shadow. Not a mask.
Nothing.
And from that nothing, a voice emerged—the same voice from the cave, but filtered through something small and innocent and utterly corrupted:
"Welcome, Darkbound. We've been waiting for you."
"The Master is so very pleased you've finally come home."
***
[END CHAPTER 55]