Amidst the suffocating silence and the mute, ashen blizzard, Arka pivoted relentlessly, desperately hunting for a fracture within this flash-frozen dimension.

  There was nothing but an endless, dead expanse of gray and white.

  Then, abruptly—devoid of the crunch of footfalls, devoid of the slightest displacement of air—a singular point of light manifested directly before his face.

  Flash!

  An elderly man stood completely materialized, hovering a mere meter from the toes of Arka’s boots.

  The elder was bald atop his crown, yet his remaining mane of stark white hair whipped wildly to the sides, seamlessly merging with a beard so violently overgrown it cascaded down to his abdomen. He was draped in ragged, moth-eaten gray robes, riddled with holes and crude stitching, looking for all the world as if he had just crawled his way out of the refuse heap of ancient history.

  His right hand, withered and skeletal, gripped a rusted iron lantern. The flame burning within its glass did not offer a warm, amber glow; it bled a pale, glacial blue, radiating an aura that made the fine hairs on the nape of Arka’s neck stand perfectly erect.

  "FUCK! A WRAITH!" Arka bellowed instinctively.

  He vaulted backward with a reflex so violently extreme he nearly pitched backward into the snow. His heart hammered a maddening, frantic rhythm, threatening to tear its way out of his throat. His breath hitched, escaping in heavy, ragged plumes of white mist.

  This was no mere startle. This entity had manifested from the absolute void, as if the surrounding darkness had suddenly decided to weave itself into flesh and bone.

  "Damn it... damn it all!" Arka cursed, his right hand already locked in a death grip around the hilt of the dagger concealed beneath his coat, primed to execute a lethal strike. "Who the hell are you?!"

  The old man offered no reply.

  He simply stood motionless amidst the descending gray ash-snow. His visage, marred by wrinkles as deep as trench lines, betrayed absolutely no emotion. His milky, cataract-clouded eyes were leveled squarely at Arka, yet it felt as though the elder were staring straight through Arka’s viscera toward something looming far behind him.

  The most harrowing detail, however, was the lantern’s light.

  Wherever that pale blue illumination fell, the gray snow upon the asphalt actively dissolved, stripping away the illusion to reveal the true floor of the street... a surface choked with dried, blackened blood and violently pulsing archaic runes.

  The elder hoisted his lantern higher, casting the glacial light directly onto Arka’s bloodless face.

  "Sagara..." the old man’s voice rasped into the void.

  It was not a human cadence. It sounded precisely like two coarse stones grinding mercilessly against one another. Hoarse, leaden, and choked with the dust of epochs.

  "It has been an eternity... since the pure blood of Sagara has set foot within this realm of shadows."

  Arka attempted to straighten his posture, but his knees committed treason. His legs quaked violently, as if his femurs had liquefied into slush. He staggered, nearly kissing the freezing, ash-covered asphalt.

  "Hah..." his frantic breaths billowed thick white vapor. "Is this a curse from that damned Rahessa?"

  His tactical mind instantly formulated the most apocalyptic scenarios. Was the ecstasy of the previous night a slow-acting venom? Had Aira siphoned his vital energy dry?

  "Treacherous viper..." he spat, forcing himself upright, locking his trembling joints.

  Running on the dregs of his adrenaline, Arka leveled a murderous glare at the lantern bearer.

  He limped cautiously, circling the ancient vagrant. His eyes narrowed into slits, scanning the entity from the tips of his dull white hair down to the hem of the tattered robes sweeping the snow. He even waved a hand aggressively before the wrinkled face.

  Yet, the lantern bearer did not flinch.

  He stood as rigid as an ancient monolith driven deep into the earth. His clouded, white eyes did not blink; there was not even the visible rise and fall of a breath.

  Then, those parched, cracked lips parted slowly.

  "Sagara..."

  The voice was heavy, echoing not against Arka’s eardrums, but vibrating directly within the marrow of his skull.

  "...The Sagara who claimed the Totem of the Death Gate..."

  THUMP.

  Arka’s heart stalled in its chamber for a fraction of a second.

  "What..."

  His eyes dilated. His jaw slacked.

  Instantaneously, the phantom agony in his legs evaporated. Pure, unadulterated adrenaline flooded his nervous system.

  Arka lunged forward with a reflexive bound—half shock, half ravenous enthusiasm—landing a mere hand's breadth from the old man's face.

  "You know of it?" he murmured in sheer bewilderment, the timbre of his voice transmuting violently from lethal caution to burning curiosity.

  Every shred of suspicion, every curse, and every paranoid conspiracy regarding Aira evaporated into the ether.

  Aira could not possibly know of this. The Totem of the Death Gate was the blackest of secrets, an abyss Arka himself had barely begun to skim. No spy of House Rahessa could possibly possess that specific nomenclature unless they were forged from the Void itself.

  The ancient elder slowly lowered his gaze, meeting Arka’s eyes with a stare that abruptly felt profoundly alive and devastatingly ancient.

  He raised his lantern a fraction, the blue fire illuminating the contours of Arka’s face.

  "I..." he whispered hoarsely.

  "...am its Gatekeeper."

  "HAAH?!?!"

  Arka gaped. The declaration was so fundamentally simple, yet its sheer absurdity caused Arka’s cognition to violently short-circuit.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  A gatekeeper? Standing in the middle of a paved street in Myst? Clad in a beggar's rags?

  Arka jabbed a trembling index finger toward the old man's face, profoundly conflicted whether to drop to his knees in reverence or burst into hysterical laughter at the escalating lunacy of his reality.

  He took a step back, crossing his arms defensively over his chest.

  His brow furrowed deeply, carving lines of intense calculation across a forehead framed by frost-tipped bangs. His eyes appraised the elder from the crown of his dull hair down to his bare, frostbitten toes resting upon the snow.

  His brain worked in overdrive, desperately striving to process this madness.

  "Alright... alright..." he muttered, exhaling a long, heavy breath that plumed into the freezing air.

  He bartered with his own sanity, forcing his logic to swallow the absurd. If he was capable of peering into the veil of ghosts and manifesting monsters, encountering an interdimensional gatekeeper was hardly out of the realm of possibility, was it?

  "Let us assume you speak the truth. You are the warden, and I am the master. Fine."

  Arka stared dead into the elder's cataract eyes. His ravenous curiosity had entirely cannibalized his terror.

  "So... this gate..." Arka gestured vaguely toward the empty air, or perhaps toward his own beating heart.

  "Is the Death Gate truly that formidable? I mean, where does its power rank in the hierarchy of the other totems?" he asked, his tone skeptical yet laced with desperate hope.

  The lantern bearer did not answer immediately. He remained silent, allowing the howling ash-snow to fill the void.

  Then, his cracked lips moved. The single word that escaped them sounded absolute, carrying the crushing gravity of a mountain plummeting into the sea.

  "The Absolute."

  Arka fell silent, awaiting the elaboration.

  The elder hoisted his lantern a fraction higher. The pale blue fire shuddered, as if resonating with its master's aura.

  "Listen to me, Young One..." his raspy voice chanted, reciting a forgotten, archaic hierarchy.

  "There exists the Gate of Creation, which ignites all things from the void..."

  "There exists the Gate of the World, which sustains the very earth beneath our boots..."

  "There exists the Gate of Heaven, promised by the divines..."

  "There exists the Gate of Preservation..."

  "And there exists the Gate of Ruin, capable of leveling mountain ranges and splitting the oceans..."

  The elder paused, fixing Arka with a stare that drove straight through his soul.

  "But tell me, Child..."

  He posed a singular, lethally simple inquiry.

  "Where do all living things... be they kings, beggars, dragons, or even the blazing stars in the firmament... where do they all march for the final time when their hourglass runs dry?"

  Arka felt his throat turn to sandpaper. The answer materialized effortlessly in his mind, an indisputable, cosmic absolute.

  "To death," Arka answered softly, his voice trembling.

  The old man offered a slow nod.

  "Precisely. All things flow into your domain. Every conceivable power, in the end, must bow before the final door."

  The wind howled fiercely, carrying jagged shards of ice.

  Arka shuddered violently.

  The fine hairs on his arms stood erect. Not from the bite of the ashen snow, but from the staggering implications of those words. He suddenly comprehended the true, apocalyptic weight slumbering within his veins. He was not merely wielding a weapon. He was wielding the absolute end of all existence.

  "Master Gatekeeper..."

  Arka swallowed hard, his voice vibrating with a volatile cocktail of terror and unbridled ambition.

  "...how do I command the power of this gate?"

  The Lantern Bearer did not answer with vocabulary. He offered no theoretical lectures or drawn-out incantations.

  Instead, his skeletal arm hoisted the lantern high above his head.

  ZIIIIIIIING!

  The blue fire within the glass detonated.

  The illumination intensified, growing blindingly incandescent, devouring the entire spectrum of color from Arka’s vision. The gray, snow-choked world was instantly swallowed by an absolute, retina-scorching whiteout.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, throwing an arm up to shield his burning vision. He felt a brutal, violent tug directly at his navel, as if his entire physical mass were being forcibly sucked through the eye of a needle.

  Then, the sensation ceased abruptly.

  And the light bled away.

  The blinding whiteness dimmed. The acoustic signature of the wind shifted. The barometric pressure altered drastically, feeling infinitely heavier, denser, and suffocating.

  Slowly, Arka forced his eyes open.

  "What..."

  His jaw went slack.

  He was no longer standing upon the freezing asphalt of Myst. He no longer beheld the silhouettes of taverns or streetlamps.

  He had been cast into another realm entirely.

  Arka rotated slowly, craning his neck upward until the vertebrae popped, desperately trying to comprehend the sheer scale of what he was witnessing.

  "Madness..." he hissed.

  This was the Realm of Titans.

  Every single element here existed on an incomprehensible, logic-defying scale. Arka felt as though he had been abruptly shrunken down into a microscopic ant, lost within the sprawling backyard of the gods.

  The topography was horrifying.

  The ground beneath Arka’s boots was no friendly, level plain. Its surface was jagged, unforgiving, and the sickly, reddish-brown hue of heavily oxidized copper.

  The "path" stretching before him was no mere road. They were massive fissures in the crust, chasms wide enough to swallow heavy siege caravans whole, yet in this world, they were merely the hairline fractures of parched soil.

  Arka swept his gaze across the horizon.

  What he initially mistook for a distant forest of towering sequoias turned out to be mere blades of wild grass. The stalks speared hundreds of meters into the firmament, each trunk as thick as a lighthouse, swaying violently beneath the breath of a primordial gale.

  The scattered boulders littering the ground near his feet—which to Arka were the size of two-story manors—were, in truth, nothing more than gravel and loose dust to the native denizens of this domain.

  To the east, Arka beheld a bizarre, jagged mountain range.

  Are those mountains? he thought, paralyzed by doubt.

  The peaks were contoured precisely like the knuckles of a clenched fist, or perhaps the gargantuan ribs of a leviathan that had perished millions of years ago, its skeletal remains now fused into the earth's crust.

  The sky above was not azure, but a dense, suffocating violet, where three lethargic, dying suns hung suspended in the void.

  Arka stood there, marooned amidst a field of gargantuan weeds where a single falling leaf possessed the mass to crush him into paste.

  He felt microscopic. Utterly, humiliatingly insignificant.

  And amidst that profound disorientation, one singular truth crystallized in his mind: to master the Death Gate, he would have to learn to survive in an arena where the word "colossal" was a pathetic understatement.

  The Lantern Bearer remained silent. He merely flicked his frail wrist.

  A sweeping, horizontal motion, tracking from left to right, as if casually dusting off the grand table of history.

  VWEOOOOM...

  The blue light from his lantern warped, projecting a visible, rippling wave of reality distortion. And the world before Arka’s eyes... was violently wrenched backward.

  This was no gentle, ethereal temporal rewind from a fairy tale. It was brutal.

  The arid, dead copper earth convulsed violently, as if seizing in agony. The oxidized red hue was violently flayed away in the blink of an eye, usurped by an explosive, blinding detonation of emerald green.

  The towering, dead monoliths of grass abruptly shrank, rehydrated, standing tall and blooming with terrifying velocity. The arid, cracked riverbeds instantly gorged themselves with roaring torrents of pristine water.

  The world had been violently resurrected into absolute fertility.

  The sudden cataclysmic shift shattered Arka’s footing. The earth beneath his boots rolled and pitched like a storm-tossed sea.

  Arka staggered, his equilibrium utterly destroyed. He collapsed to his knees, his hands digging desperately into the gargantuan grass, now slick with a primordial morning dew.

  THOOM... THOOM... THOOM...

  The vibrations escalated into madness. Dust vaulted into the air.

  "A fucking earthquake!" he cursed in a panic, believing the very realm was tearing itself apart.

  But then, his ears caught the cadence. The tremors were far too rhythmic to be tectonic. It was a percussion. The metronomic beat of a march.

  No.

  Arka tilted his head up slowly, his neck stiff with absolute terror.

  Upon that newly resurrected, emerald horizon, he saw it. A vista that fractured the very foundations of his sanity.

  Those were not mountains.

  It was an army of millions of titans on the march.

  They choked the horizon from east to west, a sprawling, undulating ocean of flesh and iron moving in horrifying unison.

  Their sheer mass was paralyzing. Every single infantryman was the size of an active stratovolcano.

  They were clad in war plate forged from slabs of pitch-black obsidian and archaic metals, pieces of armor vast enough to blanket the entirety of a royal capital. With every footfall, the earth screamed in agony. With every swing of their colossal arms, localized hurricanes were birthed.

  The halberds and spears shouldered by the vanguard pierced straight through the clouds in the violet sky.

  The grinding cacophony of their armor sounded like thousands of thunderclaps detonating simultaneously. They were marching toward a theater of cosmic warfare that had been erased from the annals of history eons ago.

  Arka, the arrogant, prideful Heir of House Sagara, could do nothing but kneel paralyzed amongst the giant weeds. Before this procession of terrifying, apocalyptic majesty, his ego was pulverized into dust.

  He felt like a mere ant. Nothing more.