Darkness. Wind. The sound of his own screaming.
Ethan Cole fell through nothing. No walls. No floor. No sky. Just black air rushing past him so fast it tore the breath from his lungs.
His last memory hit him in fragments. A desk. Construction blueprints glowing on a monitor. An energy drink going warm. The clock reading 2:17 AM.
Then his chest had tightened. His left arm went numb. And the office lights stretched into long white lines as he slid off his chair onto the carpet.
Dead at twenty-seven. In a cubicle. With nobody coming to look for him until Monday.
And now he was falling through a hole in reality with no idea where it ended.
Something flickered in the corner of his vision. Blue text, glowing, floating in the air like a projection:
[CANDIDATE DETECTED]
[INITIALIZING...]
[PLEASE STAND BY]
"Stand by?" Ethan wheezed through the wind. "I'm FALLING—"
His body hit something that wasn't the ground. It was soft, elastic, like slamming into a net made of cold silk. The impact knocked the air out of him, but nothing broke. He bounced once, twice, then rolled onto solid stone.
He lay there, gasping. The rushing air had stopped. Wherever he'd landed, it was still. Quiet. Dark, except for a faint violet glow coming from somewhere ahead.
Ethan coughed and pushed himself up. His palms scraped rough stone. The air tasted like iron and damp earth. He was on a ledge — maybe ten feet wide — jutting out from the wall of a massive vertical shaft. Above him, impossibly far, a circle of grey light. Below him, nothing. Just more darkness going down forever.
"What the..."
He looked at his hands. Same hands. Same cheap digital watch. Same calluses from gripping drafting pencils. But the office was gone. The carpet, the desk, the blueprints — all gone.
The blue text was still there, hovering at the edge of his vision like a pop-up ad he couldn't close.
[INITIALIZATION IN PROGRESS: 7%... 12%... 19%...]
"Great," he muttered. "I'm dead and my afterlife has a loading bar."
A sound cut through the silence. Not from below. From across the ledge.
Chains. Metal scraping stone.
Ethan turned toward the violet glow and saw her.
A woman was chained to the far wall. Thick iron shackles on her wrists, bolted into the rock. Her hair was silver-white, tangled and dirty but still catching the faint light. Her skin was dark — not brown, not black, but a deep obsidian that seemed to absorb the shadows around her. Her eyes were the source of the violet glow. They were open, fixed on him, and absolutely furious.
Her ears were pointed. Longer than any cosplay he'd ever seen. And they were real.
She was thin. Too thin. The kind of thin that meant weeks without proper food. But even starving and chained, she held herself like she'd slit his throat the moment he got close enough.
"Another one," she said. Her voice was hoarse, cracked from disuse, but there was ice underneath it. "They keep sending me toys to play with."
His brain was already doing the thing. The annoying autopilot thing it did at every job site, every construction meeting, every time someone handed him a problem.
Not human. Pointed ears, dark skin, violet eyes. Some kind of elf? Dark elf? The chains were wrought iron. Two-inch links, maybe three-quarter inch diameter. Tensile strength around 400 megapascals, assuming decent carbon content. The bolts anchoring them to the wall were driven into limestone. Limestone had a compressive strength of about 20 to 170 megapascals depending on density. If the bolt holes were drilled too wide—
"Stop staring at my chains," the woman snapped. "Everyone stares at my chains. Then they die."
Ethan blinked. "Your chains have bad anchor points."
Silence.
The woman's glowing eyes narrowed. "What?"
"The bolts. They're in limestone, which is soft. And whoever installed them drilled at a perpendicular angle instead of angling downward. With the right leverage — something long, like a bar — you could pop them out of the wall in maybe three pulls. Four if the rock is denser than it looks."
He said it the same way he'd tell a contractor their foundation was off-spec. Matter-of-fact. Professional.
The woman stared at him for a long time. In three years of imprisonment, dozens of sacrifices had been thrown into this pit. Criminals. Slaves. Prisoners of war. Some begged. Some attacked her. Some just curled up and waited to die.
Not one of them had ever looked at her chains and calculated their breaking point.
"Who are you?" she asked. Not angry now. Something else.
"Ethan Cole. Civil engineer." He paused. "Recently dead, apparently."
She didn't ask what a civil engineer was. She probably didn't care. But she was looking at him differently now. Like he was a puzzle instead of a meal.
Ethan used the silence to look around. His eyes were adjusting, and the more he saw, the more his hands wanted a drafting pencil.
The walls weren't natural. They were carved. Precisely carved, with load-bearing columns spaced at regular intervals — about eight meters apart, which was a reasonable span for unreinforced stone. Drainage channels ran along the base of the walls, directing water toward a central collection point. Air vents — small, angled holes in the ceiling — provided passive ventilation.
Someone had built this place. And they weren't stupid.
"This isn't a cave," Ethan said.
"What?"
"These columns. The drainage. The ventilation. This was designed by someone who understood structural engineering. Or whatever this world's version of it is." He ran his fingers along a column. Smooth. Precise. "How old is this place?"
Nyxara watched him feel up the stonework like it owed him money. "The Abyss is older than the Empire. Older than the Sundering. At least a thousand years."
"A thousand years and the columns are still standing. That's impressive load distribution."
"You are the strangest person who has ever been thrown in here."
"I get that a lot." He turned to face her. "Okay. Quick version. Where am I, who are you, and why am I not dead?"
Nyxara shifted against her chains. Even that small movement cost her visible effort. "You are in the Abyss. A chasm beneath the Ashlands, at the center of the continent of Aethermere. The Aurellian Empire — the human empire — uses it as a disposal pit. Criminals, political prisoners, and anyone else they want to disappear."
"And you?"
"Nyxara Vel'Sharen. Princess of the Shadow Court. Heir to the Twilight Depths." A bitter smile that showed teeth slightly too sharp to be human. "Also garbage, apparently. I've been chained here for three years."
"Three years?"
"My uncle framed me for my mother's murder. The Court's punishment was... poetic. Chain the princess in the dark and let her starve. Slowly."
Ethan looked at the chains again. Three years. In the dark. Alone.
He'd thought dying at his desk was bad.
Something screeched from below. Deep. Echoing. The sound bounced up the shaft like a rock thrown into a well.
The ledge vibrated.
Nyxara's eyes went wide. She knew that sound.
"That," she said, and her voice had dropped to almost nothing, "is the Abyss Lurker. It comes when new meat arrives."
[INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
The blue text exploded into a full panel, flooding Ethan's vision with light:
═══════════════════════════════════
MYRIAD BONDS INTERFACE v1.0
═══════════════════════════════════
Contractor: Ethan Cole
Realm: Unawakened
Bonds: 0/10
Stats: [LOCKED — Requires first Bond]
Skills: [LOCKED — Requires first Bond]
Domain: [LOCKED]
CURRENT THREAT ASSESSMENT:
▸ Abyss Lurker (Class: Predator)
▸ Survival probability: 3.1%
RECOMMENDATION:
▸ Bond with compatible partner
▸ immediately.
COMPATIBLE PARTNER DETECTED:
▸ Umbran Female
▸ Distance: 4.7 meters northwest
▸ Compatibility: 94%
[Debug: First-time initialization on
non-native candidate. Parameters
unusual. Monitoring.]
═══════════════════════════════════
Ethan read it three times in two seconds.
Bonds. Skills. A survival probability of three percent. A "compatible partner" four point seven meters away. And a debug note that said "parameters unusual," which in his experience as an engineer meant "we have no idea what's going to happen."
Great. Comforting.
He looked at Nyxara.
Nyxara was staring at the panel. She could see it too — the glowing blue text reflected in her violet eyes as they tracked across the words. They stopped on "BOND WITH COMPATIBLE PARTNER."
Her jaw tightened.
They looked at each other across four point seven meters of cold stone. A dead engineer and a chained princess, and neither of them had anyone who'd miss them if this didn't work.
Another screech from below. Closer. Much closer. The stone trembled under Ethan's feet. Dust and pebbles rained from the ceiling. A shadow rose from the depths — massive, shapeless, with too many limbs and a mouth that split open like a crack in the earth.
[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 2.8%]
[2.5%]
[2.1%]
The first tentacle crested the edge of the ledge. It was black, slick, thick as a tree trunk.
Ethan swallowed. His mouth was dry. His heart was hammering. Every rational part of his brain was screaming that this wasn't real, couldn't be real, he was hallucinating in his final seconds of cardiac arrest on an office floor in Chicago.
But the stone under his feet was real. The smell of iron and darkness was real. And the woman across from him, chained and starving and still refusing to look afraid — she was real.
"So," he said. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. "How do you feel about extremely accelerated first dates?"
Nyxara's eyes burned. "I am going to kill you."
"After we survive. Deal?"
The Lurker hauled itself onto the ledge. The stone cracked under its weight. Three more tentacles slammed down, each one thick enough to crush a car.
[1.7%]
[1.4%]
Nyxara looked at the creature. Looked at Ethan. Looked at the System panel counting down their lives in cold blue numbers.
She closed her eyes. Took one breath. Opened them.
Whatever she saw in his face was enough.
"...Deal."