Echoes of the Abyssal Blade: Path to Free Will-Chapter 76: Solo Mission
As dawn broke, he gathered his gear and approached the waiting Starfall carriage. The road ahead led to unknown shores, to a place where laws and gods held no sway. A place where one’s fate was not earned, but gambled.
He would enter the Abyssal Ruins.
And whatever waited for him there, he would meet it head-on.
The Starfall elders had deliberated for days to check its authenticity, and then the message came to Jonan’s quarters, his name had been chosen for this expedition to The Abyssal Ruins.
He has to go just like his predecessors; the family members of the heroes have always been at the forefront in the matters of The Abyssal Ruins, they were always tasked with exploring The Abyssal Ruins, even if someone brought with them The Greatest Ruin, it would not affect them much, because for the heroes it is not as hard for them to contain it’s effects.
He knew what it meant; no one else in his family would ever consider him for such an important matter, and he also knew that not many knew about this ruin, because it would have been big news all over.
Jonan’s recent weeks of training had not just been about the body, but the mind. Between each crushing step in front of cell 692 and his aching meditations in the pale light of the Starfall family’s prison, he’d taken time to listen — to the old warriors at the hearth, to the drunkard veterans by the city walls, and to the archivists who spoke to themselves in dusty corridors. There was a topic that always felt half-spoken, murmured in fragments — The Abyssal Ruins.
The Abyssal Ruins weren’t a myth. They were a terror and a promise in equal measure, a phenomenon older than records, unclaimed by any history or divine narrative. Not even the Heroes, those immortalized by blood and legend, knew their origin. No ancient text spoke of their creation, no prophet had ever truly divined their meaning. All that was known was that they appeared without pattern — in the bowels of the earth, on isolated islands, amid the endless skies above cloudlines, or even at the heart of a bustling city. There was no warning. One moment, the world was as it always had been, and the next — there it was. A ruin, its entrance marked by a soft, unnatural purple radiance, a light with no source, no warmth, and no practical purpose. It simply was.
This violet glow became a death knell for some, a calling for others. The laws governing the Abyssal Ruins were few but absolute. A person could only enter an Abyssal Ruin once in their lifetime. Try again, and the ruin would reject you, sometimes violently, sometimes subtly — draining the color from your flesh, turning your bones to salt, or leaving you stranded in an eternal reflection of yourself. Tales varied, but the warning was always the same: one chance.
And yet, the allure was irresistible.
For inside those strange, shifting spaces lay the chance to alter one’s fate entirely. Some called it madness, others named it destiny. It was said that inside the Abyssal Ruins, one might find the greatest opportunity or the most harrowing ruin. A crown or a noose, though none would know which until it was too late. And this was not just personal ruin — no, it could be something far worse. The history of Dreavows was marked by those rare and terrible instances where someone had walked out of an Abyssal Ruin carrying the greatest ruin, a curse or calamity that reshaped kingdoms and annihilated bloodlines.
And still, people went.
Because sometimes, very rarely, the greatest opportunity emerged instead. It had happened only once in the recorded annals of Dreavows — to the seventh Hero of the Beast Races, a half-abomination whose name was forbidden in many tongues and still sung in others. No one knew what he had taken from the Abyssal Ruins, only that from that day forth, he had been unstoppable, a force that no Hero, no Monarch, no Celestial dared to stand against. He had razed cities and raised empires, driven entire bloodlines into extinction, and remade the beast tribes in his image.
Jonan’s elders spoke of it like a storm that had come and gone, a disaster barely survived, a miracle few would acknowledge. And in every tale, there remained one truth: no one, before or after him, ever found that kind of opportunity again.
The inside of an Abyssal Ruin was nothing like the outside. Those who returned spoke in feverish tongues, their descriptions more delirium than record. No two ruins were the same, and even those who entered together would sometimes find themselves in utterly separate realities. Some spoke of seas of black glass under a violet sun. Others told of sprawling cities built by beings not of Dreavows, with customs so alien that even basic gestures could spark war or salvation.
Creatures inside these ruins did not belong to Dreavows. Their ways, their Path to Power, their rites of passage were as incomprehensible as their language, yet one thing was certain — they too were trapped within, or perhaps born there, forever severed from the outside world. Some were monstrous, others eerily human. Jonan had heard of a man who met a girl with glass skin, whose eyes contained miniature starfields. She taught him a name of power, and with it, he destroyed a river kingdom when he left. Another story told of a beast, shaped like a snake with a hundred limbs, who offered to trade its own eye for the man’s memories of his mother. He agreed, and never remembered her again.
Despite the ever-changing nature of these realms, there was a constant, a cruel kind of structure beneath the madness. Every Abyssal Ruin possessed what came to be called The Trend.
This was not a pattern one could chart on maps or divine from old stories. The Trend was a progression, a thematic thread tying the events and challenges within a particular ruin together. Sometimes it was trials of strength, others of loyalty, or riddles of impossible moral consequence. Recognizing The Trend was vital. Those who failed to notice it met swift, often horrific ends.
If you discerned it, you could predict the next ordeal, adjust your actions, and perhaps navigate the madness. And even then, what one gained at the end was dictated by forces unknown — by fate, by the Abyss itself, by luck, or by the whims of the ruin’s unknown architects. You could reach the end of a ruin’s trial only to have your prize be a ruin in disguise: a cursed artifact, a blood debt you did not know you’d incurred, a flaw in your soul that would surface years later.
But... there was always the chance it would be the greatest opportunity instead.
And so, against wisdom, against fear, against the warnings of their ancestors, people still threw themselves into the Abyssal Ruins. Hope was a drug more powerful than any opiate. The rumors of power, of fate-altering artifacts, of names forgotten by even the gods — it was too much to resist.
Now it was Jonan’s turn.
His next mission was to seek one of these Abyssal Ruins.
A month prior, scouts had reported the appearance of a ruin just north of Dreavows’ borderlands, on a nameless, mist-wreathed island that hadn’t existed a week before. A half-submerged ruin had risen from the ocean, a cluster of black spires and half-toppled columns, and at its base, the unmistakable purple glow shimmered like a bruise on the world.
The Starfall elders had deliberated for days. Then the message came to Jonan’s quarters: his name had been chosen.
He was to go.
Not Rhydian, not any of the elder warriors, not even Vega. It would be him.
He knew what it meant. Either they believed him strong enough to survive — or expendable enough to lose.
The night before his departure, Jonan spoke to an old archivist in the family library. The man was near blind, his fingers blackened with ink stains from copying ancient texts. He told Jonan a final story.
"There was once a woman," the archivist rasped, "who entered an Abyssal Ruin seeking a cure for her dying son. She found a field of glass flowers and a man with the face of her husband, though he had died years before. He offered her what she sought — in exchange for the boy’s name. She agreed. She returned with a vial of light. Her son was healed, lived long and well... but she could never remember his name. Not in her dreams, not on her deathbed."
Jonan had left with those words nesting in his skull.
As dawn broke, he gathered his gear and approached the waiting Starfall carriage. The road ahead led to unknown shores, to a place where laws and gods held no sway. A place where one’s fate was not earned, but gambled.
He would enter the Abyssal Ruins.
And whatever waited for him there, he would meet it head-on.
Now it was Jonan’s turn.
His next mission was to seek one of these Abyssal Ruins.
A month prior, scouts had reported the appearance of a ruin just north of Dreavows’s borderlands, on a nameless, mist-wreathed island that hadn’t existed a week before. A half-submerged ruin had risen from the ocean, a cluster of black spires and half-toppled columns, and at its base, the unmistakable purple glow shimmered like a bruise on the world.
