God's Tree-Chapter 145: Descent into the Hollow Earth

The morning didn't come.

Not truly.

Instead of sunlight, there was only a dull shift in the air—a suggestion of daybreak.

The sky remained colorless, washed-out, and indifferent, and the red glow from the stone steps had not faded. It pulsed now, slightly brighter than before, like it had grown more eager overnight.

Argolaith stood at the edge of the cliff before anyone else stirred, his cloak tugged gently by the windless air.

The staircase remained unchanged—ancient, forbidden, and incomplete, as though it wasn't built but rather revealed, peeled back from the world like a scab removed from an old wound.

Behind him, the others began to rise.

Kaelred blinked blearily. "Please tell me this is one of those nightmares you get to wake up from."

"No dream," Malakar said, already inspecting the red-lit steps with narrowed eyes. "This path wants something."

Argolaith didn't turn. "Then we'll give it nothing."

Kaelred stared. "We're not going down there?"

Argolaith finally looked over his shoulder, eyes sharp. "We are. But we're not giving it fear. Not hesitation. Not belief. If it's watching… let it know we see it too."

They began the climb down in silence.

Each step was colder than the last, though no wind reached them. The runes in the stone pulsed faintly with each footfall, and after a dozen steps, the world above vanished behind them.

Not in distance—in memory.

Kaelred turned to glance back and froze.

"There's nothing up there."

Argolaith looked. He was right.

The world above was gone.

Not black.

Not gray.

Just… missing.

Like they were falling not into earth, but into a forgotten space between time and place.

As they descended, the walls of the chasm slowly closed inward. What had begun as a stair along an open cliff became a tunnel, lined with jagged walls carved not by tools, but by teeth and time.

Strange carvings emerged—deeper, older than the runes outside. They pulsed not with red, but with thought.

Argolaith paused at one. It showed figures—tall, faceless, each reaching toward a tree whose roots stretched downward instead of up. At its base, something slept, coiled in shadow.

Malakar studied the etching and spoke in a low tone. "The tree is not the prize. It is the seal."

Further down, the silence was broken.

By a voice.

Soft.

Distant.

Genderless.

"Do you know what you are doing?"

Argolaith stopped.

The others froze.

The voice didn't echo.

It was inside their minds.

"You walk a path carved in blood, watered with lifeblood not your own. Do you think power comes without price?"

Kaelred whispered, "I hate places that talk to me. Talking forests, talking ruins, talking sword once… It never ends well."

Argolaith didn't respond to the voice.

He just kept walking.

And the path let him.

The stairs ended in a vast chamber.

It had no clear ceiling—just darkness above, shot through with floating shards of reflective stone.

The floor was glass. Beneath it, images swam—reflections of memories not their own.

Argolaith saw a boy with blue eyes staring into a dry riverbed.

Kaelred saw himself standing alone atop a tower, soaked in blood he didn't recognize.

Malakar saw a silver tree, burning with green fire, as corpses praised it in song.

Thae'Zirak… saw nothing. The floor didn't reflect him at all.

"This place doesn't just watch," Malakar murmured. "It knows."

They stepped lightly, passing between towering fragments of mirror. As they did, figures flickered within—versions of themselves that whispered in reversed voices, reaching toward the glass but never breaking through.

Kaelred flinched. "I saw myself blink… but I didn't."

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"It's testing us," Argolaith said. "Trying to see what we doubt."

"Trying to feed," Thae'Zirak growled.

The path ahead narrowed, curling into a corridor of polished obsidian, each wall etched with ancient tree roots twisting inwards.

And at the end of it—

A door.

Carved from stone and bone, sealed by five empty inlays shaped like teardrops.

Each the size of a vial.

Each clearly meant for something they knew well.

Argolaith stepped closer, heart steady.

The door pulled at him, gently—like it recognized his steps.

But the third vial of lifeblood was not yet his.

He had only two.

And the door remained closed.

The air shuddered.

Then, without warning, the corridor reversed—collapsing not in structure, but in logic. The path bent backward, the floor rolled beneath their feet, and they were pulled—

Upward.

Light flared—red to white.

The sound of wind returned.

And suddenly, they were back on the cliff's edge.

No stairs.

No door.

Only the chasm, and the bones.

Kaelred staggered. "Did we…?"

Malakar shook his head. "It showed us what lies beneath. But we are not ready."

Argolaith looked down at his hands. They trembled faintly.

But only for a moment.

"It wanted to remind us," he said quietly, "that the lifeblood isn't a gift. It's a key."

"And once we gather all five…" Malakar added, "we may have no choice but to open that door."

They didn't speak for hours.

After the collapse of the unnatural stairway—after the door of bone and stone vanished like mist before dawn—the group had set out once again, this time following the slope of the ridgeline westward.

The silence between them was not empty. It was heavy. It meant something.

Even Kaelred, ever the voice of sarcasm and weary wit, kept his mouth shut for longer than he ever had in Argolaith's memory. When he did finally speak, it was only to say:

"Still hate places that bend space."

No one disagreed.

The sky remained its familiar sickly gray, but something had changed. The air had lost its suffocating pressure, and the paths beneath their boots had grown more solid.

The trees—while still twisted and wrong—were less alive now. Less watchful. As if the land had briefly held its breath and now exhaled… retreating.

Whatever test the stair had been, they had passed. Or at the very least, survived.

By midday, they stopped near a dry riverbed filled with stones the size of fists. Argolaith crouched and brushed his fingers across the river's edge. It hadn't run water in a long time, but the sediment was clean. Smooth. Real.

Kaelred knelt nearby, scooping up a handful of pebbles. "Finally. Something that isn't trying to whisper into my bones."

Thae'Zirak stretched his wings on a flat rock nearby. "This land is not whole. But it is no longer resisting us."

Argolaith stood and scanned the horizon. Ahead, the warped terrain gave way to rolling bluffs and pockets of forest—dark, ancient groves clinging to the edge of the twisted zone.

Malakar joined him, cloak fluttering in a weak breeze. "We're past the worst of it. For now."

Argolaith nodded. "We keep moving. The third tree won't come to us."

"I was hoping it might," Kaelred muttered, "considering how much trauma we've already endured."

"Trees aren't sympathetic," Thae'Zirak rumbled. "They were created to judge."

"And to seal," Argolaith added quietly.

The group fell into a steady pace.

Late that evening, as the sun failed once again to fully set, they climbed a high ridge to survey the land ahead.

Argolaith reached the crest first—and froze.

In the distance, through the haze of hanging mist and broken hills, a faint glow shimmered. Not fire. Not torchlight. Something softer.

It pulsed once. Then again. Slow. Rhythmic.

Kaelred climbed up beside him and followed his gaze. "That's not a village."

"No," Argolaith said. "It's something else."

The glow came from a single point in the landscape—a deep forest valley nestled between three jagged peaks, their tops lost to the clouds.

The trees in that valley were taller than anything they'd seen in weeks, and the glow seemed to breathe from beneath their canopy.

"It could be a marker," Malakar said from behind. "Some trees project their presence long before the call reaches you."

Argolaith's jaw tensed. He reached inward—but still, no pull. No tree called to him. Not yet.

But he knew.

"It's not the tree. Not yet. But it's on the path."

He turned from the ridge, eyes burning with resolve.

"We go there."

That night, they camped near the edge of the valley. The soft glow still flickered in the distance, like the light of a lantern swaying slowly in deep water.

Argolaith sat at the fire, absently turning the rune-marked vials in his hands—two filled with lifeblood, glowing faintly even in the dark. The third spot on his belt remained empty.

He could feel it coming.

The next trial.

The next test.

Whatever had been beneath the chasm was part of this. But it was not the whole. Something waited in the valley below. Something older than memory and stronger than silence.

Kaelred leaned back on a stone. "You think the next tree will be there?"

"No," Argolaith answered, staring into the fire. "But the thing guarding it might be."