The moment Sunless stepped through the hole in the trunk, she did not find herself underground.
There was no tunnel. There was no soil, and there was no darkness of the ordinary kind.
Instead, she arrived in a place that felt like it should not exist at all.
It was a dimension hidden beneath the withered tree, but calling it a dimension almost felt inadequate. It was like a wound in reality. A folded space.
A place that had been buried not beneath the earth, but beneath the laws of the world itself.
Sunless stood on nothing.
Or rather, she stood on a surface that looked like shadow made solid. It stretched endlessly beneath her feet like a black sea that had forgotten how to move. Yet every now and then, faint ripples passed through it as though something vast and sleeping stirred beneath it.
There was no true sky above.
Only a vast expanse of dim, unnatural gloom that seemed both near and impossibly far away.
Sometimes, pale grey light flickered in the distance.
Sometimes, strips of darkness drifted through the air like torn curtains.
And sometimes, for the briefest moments, the space around her twisted in ways that made it feel as though up and down had no meaning here.
The air was cold.
Not the cold of wind or winter.
But the cold of a tomb that had never known sunlight.
And throughout this strange place, there was only one thing that gave it structure.
Roots.
Countless roots.
Vast roots.
Ancient roots.
Withered roots.
Living roots.
They hung from above, rose from below, crossed through the distance, and curved around one another like serpents, chains, and veins.
Some were as thin as a finger.
Some were as large as towers.
Some were black and dry like the bark of the withered tree outside.
Some were pale grey and looked more like petrified bones than roots.
And some pulsed faintly as though living blood flowed through them.
They stretched so far in every direction that Sunless could not see where most of them began or ended.
However, her eyes did not remain on the roots for long.
Because at the center of this wrong and strange dimension... was a corpse.
It was the corpse of a Herald.
Simon, Merath, and Jorra had not been completely certain that the Herald’s corpse was here, but if they were to see it, they would be surprised.
Especially Simon.
Sunless who knew more about the withered tree and the secret beneath it, could not look at the corpse without feeling a strange pressure in her heart.
And she was a Demon King!
As for why Simon would be shocked if he was standing before the Herald’s corpse, it’s because it was enormous.
Much larger than any ordinary being would imagine upon hearing the word corpse.
If Simon had been here, even with all his experience, he would have been stunned by its size.
Its body was not merely several times larger than a mortal human or demon.
No.
It was colossal.
Its cracked marble body lay suspended in the air, pinned and bound by the roots of the withered tree like a divine prisoner who had been crucified by a forest of death.
Its torso alone was larger than many buildings.
Its limbs were long and elegant, but broken in several places.
Its masked face was tilted slightly downward, as though even in death, it was gazing at the world below with some unfathomable thought left unfinished.
Golden light still seeped from the countless fractures that covered its body, but the light was weak now.
It was faint, sickly, and it was like the final glow of a dying star.
Large pieces of its marble-like flesh had chipped away, revealing deeper layers of cracked stone and old, hardened gold within.
One arm was broken.
Part of its shoulder was gone.
The mask on its face was cracked from the forehead down to the chin.
And beside the Herald’s corpse floated a broken lantern.
It was much larger than the lanterns Simon remembered the Heralds carrying on Earth. Chains of root and shadow had wrapped around it, pinning it in place. Its glass was shattered, and from within it came faint whispers so low that even Sunless could barely hear them.
Somewhere in those whispers were words.
Somewhere in them were screams.
Somewhere in them were truths that had long ago rotted.
The roots of the withered tree did not merely wrap around the corpse.
They pierced it.
Some roots entered through the Herald’s chest and emerged from its back.
Some stabbed through its limbs.
Some crawled into the cracks of its marble body and spread through it like parasites feeding on a carcass.
Other roots had burrowed through the Herald’s abdomen, through its throat, and even through the hollow cracks around its masked face.
The sight was both magnificent and revolting.
A divine being had been turned into nourishment.
A Herald had become soil for a tree that should never have existed.
Sunless stared at the corpse in silence for a while.
Then her gaze slowly shifted.
Not far from the Herald, suspended amidst a cluster of roots, was something else.
Something that belonged to her... her soul.
Sunless’ soul did not look like a flame, and neither did it look like a crystal or a form of light.
It looked like a dark eclipse given form.
At its center was a sphere of absolute shadow, darker than everything around it. It was not smooth, for its surface constantly moved, flowing and writhing as though it was made of living darkness.
Around that black sphere floated a thin crescent ring of pale silver-grey light.
The ring rotated slowly around the sphere, disappearing at times behind it before emerging again, like a moon circling a world of night.
Within the sphere, a vague humanoid outline could sometimes be seen.
A female figure curled in on itself.
Then the outline would vanish, and the soul would become a pure black orb once more.
Countless roots were connected to it.
Some wrapped around it gently.
Some pierced into its surface.
Some sank into the pale ring.
Others stretched from the soul back into the trunk of the withered tree above, back into the Herald’s corpse, and outward into the strange dimension itself.
It was a strange symbiosis.
The withered tree fed from the Herald.
The roots nourished Sunless’ soul.
And Sunless’ soul, in turn, had become one with this entire hidden place.