Elarion Shattered

He didn't go home right away.

The streets felt thinner than they should have.

The breeze never came back.

And somewhere between the edge of the square and the start of the fields, Jalen stopped thinking about errands, about chores, about anything normal.

His feet knew where he was going long before his mind caught up.

Back to the hill.

Back to the place that didn't feel done with him.

He'd told Marta it was nothing. It was just some dirt. 

However, the hill rose ahead of him like something watching.

Jalen stood at its base, arms crossed, breath clouding faintly in the late morning air.

The light was thin again, filtered through slow-moving clouds. It should've felt peaceful, but it didn't.

The feeling from before still clung to him, low and deep in the chest.

The kind of quiet that didn't bring calm.

The kind that warned.

He adjusted the strap of his satchel and began the climb.

Each step came slower than the last.

The dirt path he'd taken yesterday had grown strange overnight—less earth and more dry moss, brittle at the edges.

The grass around the trail had grayed. No morning dew. No birdsong. With pale roots threading deep like veins, too stubborn to stop.

By the time he reached the ridge, the ground had shifted entirely. Veins of pale fungus wound through the soil like threads of rot sewn too carefully to be natural.

He crouched and opened his satchel, taking out a cloth-wrapped trowel and a small herb jar. Gilbert had asked for a sample. Simple task.

No one had warned him it might feel like stealing from something that still remembered what it lost.

He scraped the tool into the dirt. The tendrils moved slightly. Not enough to say they were alive. But enough to say they noticed.

Then it happened.

A cold shimmer passed in front of his eyes.

Not light. Not shadow. Something else.

System Message:

[Quest Received: Local Crop Threat – Investigate Spores]

• Objective: Investigate the unnatural fungal growth.

• Status: Observation phase. Avoid direct contamination.

• Reward: [Pending]

The message lingered longer than it should have.

Then it vanished.

Another shimmer followed.

System Alert: [This message was not meant for you.]

Jalen didn't move.

The wind had stopped. The soil beneath his knees felt colder now, damp, but not from rain.

His hand hovered over the fungal strands. His breath came slow and shallow.

It had felt… real.

Not a hallucination. Not a dream.

The System was supposed to activate when your class matured, when you earned something. It was never just because you brushed too close to a dying patch of land.

He pulled his hand back, carefully.

Like the air had teeth.

He crouched again without thinking,

scanning the dirt for any sign the System might return.

None did.

The silence pressed harder now.

Even the far-off sounds of the village had vanished. Jalen stood, brushing his hands on his pants, then stared toward the heart of the hill.

He should've gone back.

He had the sample. He could hand it to Gilbert and forget about this place. No one would blame him for avoiding the rest of the ridge.

But his feet stayed planted.

There was something ahead—something half-seen and unfinished.

It pulled at him.

And so he walked.

The ground changed as he moved.

The grass thinned and vanished entirely. Lichen coated the stones, and the air had a faint metallic scent. Not strong. Just enough to make him taste it.

Veins of white fungus curled along the path like they were drawn there on purpose.

Then, just beyond the rise, the land curved inward again.

A deeper fold. Not a pit. Not erosion.

Just… wrong.

It looked smooth. Deliberate even. As if something had finished digging and never came back out.

Jalen crouched again and swept aside the surface layer.

Beneath the dirt was something solid. Flat. Worked.

Stone? No—something else. The texture was unfamiliar, like polished bone left in the rain too long.

There were markings on it.

Glyphs.

Not many. Faint. Just enough to say: This was made. This was meant to be like this.

The soil shifted beneath him, and he froze.

Not shaking. Not noise. Just… movement. Like the ground had sighed.

He stepped back, heart rising in his chest.

A gust of wind scraped across the hill, dry and sudden.

Then nothing.

And yet something stayed behind.

But of course, he kept walking.

Whatever he'd uncovered wasn't the end of it—just a piece.

The hollow wasn't small.

What he'd seen from above was only the rim—just enough to draw his eyes, not enough to show its depth.

As Jalen stepped closer, he realized the slope curved gradually inward, like the land had bowed in on itself. It wasn't steep. But it was wide. Too wide.

The light didn't reach far inside. The walls were smooth, earthen, yet stripped of their roots and stones. Nothing natural had made this.

He moved to the edge and crouched.

The inside of the hollow felt heavier than air.

Not silent, exactly—just absent. Like sound didn't belong here.

He leaned forward. For a breath, he thought he saw something shift in the dirt below—no form, just a fold of shadow that hadn't been there before.

His fingers grazed the soil.

Pressure.

It hit him without sound or light.

Just a wave behind his ears, like the air around him had thickened all at once. His ears popped. His vision narrowed.

For half a second, the world tilted.

He recoiled, hand instinctively pulling back.

The pressure vanished the moment he moved.

Jalen steadied himself and stared again. The hollow hadn't changed.

But it no longer felt empty.

He looked down, and for just a moment, a faint glyph shimmered near the bottom—dim and colorless, like a memory carved into the land and half-erased by time.

It pulsed once.

Then nothing.

The wind returned across the ridge.

A bird chirped somewhere far off, as if it hadn't been silenced at all.

Jalen stood, slowly. One step back.

Then another.

His chest ached—not from fear.

From something else.

Disappointment. Or maybe relief.

He didn't know what he'd been expecting.

But whatever it was, the hill had not given it to him.

It had watched him.

Judged him.

And let him go.

But as he turned to leave, the silence didn't lift.

And something in the earth—low, buried, listening—had not let go.