Twilight
Twilight
The bottom of the Bottomless Abyss.
There was no up, down, left, or right there.
He called it the bottom for convenience, but only because the fall had stopped at last.
Considering that even this might be some authority wielded by the Flock, there truly was no direction at all—no forward, no back.
The landscape left Aslan with a strange, elusive familiarity.
The same familiarity evoked by the trial of Sorrow and Death.
But compared to that blank, featureless darkness, this abyss was deeper and heavier—suffocating.
As if he'd been locked inside a black room of unknowable size.
Aslan clutched at his chest, breath catching, and looked around.
Only pure, absolute darkness met his eyes.
A darkness so intense it came with the clear certainty that this was not reality.
Yet a darkness so thin in its sense of distance that he somehow felt completely exposed.
Aslan thought within it.
He walked with his thoughts.
Each step brought no sensation of contact, yet he advanced.
There was no real feeling of forward movement, but his legs moved, so he had to accept it.
And as he walked, he had to think of something—anything—to keep from going mad.
Yes, for instance: the identity of what he had glimpsed among the Flock moments ago.
Aslan recalled that chilling eye.
The eye that brought to mind a sheep, a goat, a mountain goat, an octopus. A horizontal pupil was the correct term.
Its interior blazed with a brilliant yellow light, like fire.
Even across a distance so vast it felt as though not even light could bridge it, Aslan felt that eye staring directly at him.
That crushing power and presence.
He had felt it when he held Tormule's spear.
So he was certain.
That thing was the closest he'd come to the essence of the being hiding behind that laughable name: the Flock of Dusk.
But aside from being among the Flock and having a horizontal pupil, Aslan couldn't begin to guess what kind of existence it was.
To begin with, what being could summon someone from Earth into a world like this?
A Cthulhu Mythos monster that chose the octopus as its emblem?
He didn't know.
Perhaps that gaze and smile were traps—a false front designed to lead his speculation exactly where it wanted.
So as he walked, Aslan set the thought aside.
A question with no nourishment, no answer.
The next thought, perhaps because of that, came far clearer.
'Why did the Flock do this?'
Aslan glanced around, thinking.
This bottomless, endless abyss.
He didn't know much about the Flock of Dusk's patterns of behavior.
The Flock seemed particularly averse to Aslan becoming isolated, unable to proceed, or slipping from its watch.
To the point of intervening directly to resolve it when it happened.
Forcing paths open, forcing resurrections, hurrying Aslan along.
And yet, it didn't seem to value his life or death all that much.
It had been the same with the Sword of the War God. The same against the Dragon-king.
When Aslan faced a mortal crisis, the Flock remained utterly silent.
Not a fragment of its presence appeared.
What purpose would make it disregard his survival but push his progress forward?
He was following that thread when he stopped abruptly.
Because in that light, this current situation was deeply strange.
At a glance, this abyss looked impossible to progress through—let alone escape.
Aslan had no idea how to get out.
Yet the Flock did not intervene.
Was it because this was its domain, its authority, its false front?
Because he had already been swallowed?
If those conditions meant it wouldn't intervene, then it could have acted and swallowed him before he ever received the main quest.
The fact that it hadn't meant there was a reason it hadn't.
So Aslan thought:
Maybe the reason it wasn't intervening now was that he wasn't actually in a state of halted progress—wasn't truly isolated.
Maybe there was some purpose behind this.
Maybe this was a threat to his life, but not true isolation.
And it was just as Aslan was solidifying that deduction.
As if confirming his conclusion, the Flock affirmed it.
Suddenly, wind blew.
"...GET DOWN!"
A shout in a familiar language. But not entirely familiar.
Aslan's head turned on reflex at the voice, and an alien landscape opened before him.
Densely packed wooden stakes—trenches, he'd guess. Something came screaming down onto them, and an explosion sent metal fragments raining like hail.
The moment Luck screamed a warning, Aslan thrust out a hand.
"Domination!"
A barrier solidified by telekinesis unfolded in front of him.
Something struck it, embedded itself, and ate away at his mana.
KAGAGAGANG!
Sparks burst, and shrapnel ricocheted off. Even Aslan, who knew nothing of military matters, could tell it was fragmentation from a bomb.
The fragments pattered to the ground, and Aslan's eyes widened at the scene beyond.
"What in the..."
A bewildered voice. The landscape was utterly foreign.
A battlefield had opened before him.
Figures in monochrome uniforms rampaged with rifles.
When they pulled their triggers, those climbing over the trenches crumpled, scattering blood.
A grenade tossed by one of them shredded a human form into scattered pieces.
Mutual slaughter. But colder, more indirect—different from the raw carnage of Geladrion's battlefields.
As Aslan stood there, unable to grasp the scene, the world slowly melted.
"...Huh?!"
The landscape dissolved away, and another rushed in to fill the void.
Likewise, the ground beneath his feet vanished.
The vertigo of freefall followed immediately. His vision blurred as the distance stretched. The instant he recognized the fall, Aslan twisted his body.
Through the roaring wind, he wrenched himself around and kicked the nearest wall.
Crash!
"Guh—?!"
The wall buckled inward, and he was sucked through.
Aslan tumbled across the floor.
Gasping from the impact, he pushed himself up, hands pressing through shattered glass fragments.
What he'd kicked hadn't been a wall. It had been a window.
A window of a high-rise building, dark and unreadable in the deep night.
Aslan looked out through the window he'd broken, and the nightscape filled his eyes with chaos.
The view reflected in his teal eyes was a city, fractured in teal.
And not just any city—a futuristic one.
Architecture impossible for modern technology, a grey forest of soaring buildings threaded by countless flying cars.
The city blazed even more brilliantly against the darkness of night, and to Aslan, it looked like something he'd seen somewhere before.
'What is happening?'
Moments ago, it had looked like a battlefield from the near-past, not the modern day. Now it was a futuristic landscape.
Unable to make sense of it, Aslan stopped to try to grasp the situation—and the moment he did, the world melted again.
He clicked his tongue. As the floor crumbled, he launched himself into a full rotation midair and landed.
The place he landed was yet another world.
Not Geladrion's damp, oddly skewed medieval period, but something closer to the Renaissance.
Aslan stood in the city, watching people hurry across the plaza.
They were distinctly different.
Some had animal ears and tails, and not hybrids of the Self-Birthing Mother—there were beautiful men and women with unusually long ears passing among them.
Some wore the classic adventurer's gear straight out of a typical fantasy.
Armor with no historical basis, just plate and leather thrown together into an aesthetic construction.
Aslan frowned, and the entire landscape—people and all—collapsed.
It collapsed and another world appeared. This one, too, was entirely different.
But the moment he saw it, Aslan knew what it was.
A world familiar to Aslan's eyes—more precisely, to Lee Hyun-woo's eyes.
It was the world of a dark fantasy game where you killed four divine beings and rekindled the world's fire.
He recognized it from its iconic, symbolic backdrop.
A grey-toned temple built around a roaring flame, looking somehow fallen from grace.
A very famous game. One he'd played himself.
"...This place."
After that, the world collapsed again and again.
And watching those worlds shift, one after another, Aslan finally began to find his bearings.
He didn't recognize every world, but he recognized many of them.
They were games he had played, heard of, or seen.
Comics he'd read somewhere before.
Novels a friend had recommended.
Legends he'd heard somewhere.
Especially the legends—those, he was sure of.
It was obvious when it was a classic mythic Valhalla, centered on a great tree where gods and wolves, serpents, and dragons fought.
The monk's landscape he'd seen once, the hell overrun with demons, also appeared before his eyes.
They all shared one common thread.
They were fictional, imaginary worlds born from someone's fantasy or oral tradition.
Just like the Geladrion he was experiencing.
And once Aslan realized that, he couldn't help but realize one more thing.
The Flock was showing him all of this directly.
But why?
There was no clue to its intent, no basis for an answer.
Yet Aslan was certain of one thing.
This was a game at his expense.
A careful drip of difficulty, information, and secrets, letting him think, deduce, and reason his way slowly toward its true identity.
Feeding him information like a patronizing gift.
That was his conclusion.
Having reached it, Aslan ground his teeth.
It sickened him.
The world before his eyes—a game world of legendary spies—crumbled, and just as a new world began to rise, Aslan swung the Dragon-king's fist at it.
WOOOOONG—CRAAAASH!
The turbine roar of mana burning, and his fist landed. The world shattered into fragments.
Aslan watched the pieces of world strewn across the ground like broken glass. He clenched his fist and shook it lightly.
"Enough."
The world began to reassemble. Aslan spat the words.
"I'm sick of your stupid games."
Words directed at an absent presence—absent, and obvious.
At the sound of Aslan's voice, the world ceased its reassembly, dying and seeping back into the abyss.
The sound of that seepage sounded, to Aslan's ears, like mockery.
It might be his imagination. But after what he'd just experienced, he was sure.
The Flock was laughing.
Aslan, who had barely raised his head, swallowed his breath, and the world shifted once more.
A stretch of desolate shore. Aslan saw it and was about to shout—
"Aslan?"
A familiar voice.
He froze. He caught his breath, bewildered.
Every world he'd experienced until now had never perceived him.
But the owner of this voice had perceived him first—and already knew him.
He couldn't help his curiosity.
After all, Lee Hyun-woo was someone who liked people.
He turned, breath ragged, and found an unexpected face.
Long black hair, thick and wavy.
Richly textured and dense, like a large dog's coat.
A small, delicate face framed within it, with large, vivid blue eyes.
A woman standing barefoot alone on the shore as the black sea surged in.
"As...trid?"
The woman held her collar close and looked at him.
Aslan looked back and could find no words. The woman faced him, her expression shifting through layers of emotion.
"...My dear friend. It really is you, Aslan."
Her voice came out slightly hollow, as if her throat had tightened.
Meeting that voice and expression, speech failed him. She composed herself and forced a smile.
A gentle, bright smile.
The kind of smile that lingered in a corner of Aslan's memory.
It was a smile forced to erase complicated feelings—and the brightness of it only transferred that complexity onto him.
"I'm glad to see you again. Have you been well?"
She smiled and greeted him as if nothing had happened.
But in that complicated expression, Aslan could read something clearly.
Astrid knew she was dead.
So he couldn't answer.