Arthur studied the inscriptions a while longer, tracing weathered carvings with his fingertips, but gained no further insight into his situation. The ancient pictographs remained enigmatic—offering tantalizing clues without context sufficient to guide him.
'Time to venture outside,' he decided, straightening and turning toward the nearest archway. 'I need to get my bearings, see what I'm dealing with.'
As he approached the doorway, sunlight streamed through the opening with unexpected intensity. Arthur raised a hand to shield his eyes, squinting against the sudden brightness as he stepped through the threshold and into the open air.
He paused on the top step, allowing his vision to adjust to the daylight. The stone building he had emerged from sat atop a plateau-like elevation, with broad staircases cascading down on all four sides to meet the ground below. The architecture reminded him of ancient Mesoamerican temples from Earth's history books—a stepped pyramid structure designed to elevate its holy spaces above the surrounding landscape.
But it wasn't the building itself that captured Arthur's attention once his eyes adjusted.
At the Academy, Arthur remembered learning a couple things about this realm. It was called Aragon and at the center of the realm there is a tower breaching the clouds surrounded by the ruins of an old city currently being used as a stronghold, this was where the core was.
He also remembered being told that almost every Chosen sent into a new Realm for the first time will spawn somewhere relatively close to the core. The reason remains unknown, but evidence suggests a natural attraction between a Chosen's Core and the Realm's core—like magnets drawn to each other across dimensional boundaries.
Arthur slowly turned in a complete circle, scanning the horizon from his elevated position. In every direction, as far as he could see, stretched an endless expanse of rolling plains. No tower pierced the clouds. No ruins broke the monotony of the landscape. Nothing but open landscape extended to the horizon in all directions.
'Almost everyone, huh? Guess I didn't make the cut,' Arthur thought grimly as the full implications of his situation sank in.
If he was so far from the core that he couldn't even see it, his chances of survival had just plummeted from slim to virtually nonexistent.
Yet, strangely, this realization didn't crush Arthur's spirit as it might have others. He had entered the Realms already expecting to die. The fact that he had survived his first encounter with a corrupted entity was already more than he had anticipated.
'I'm living on borrowed time anyway,' he thought with grim acceptance.
But even as he acknowledged the near-certainty of his fate, Arthur felt no inclination to surrender to it. He might fully expect never to return home alive, but that wouldn't stop him from trying. There was no scenario in which he would simply give up without a fight… not anymore.
He closed his eyes, centering his awareness on the Core within him. As his adrenaline from the earlier battle faded, Arthur became aware of an unusual sensation.
It felt as though something inside his chest was straining forward, pulling him like an invisible tether in a specific direction. The sensation was almost physical—as though his Core might literally tear free from his body if he resisted too strongly.
'At least I have a direction to follow,' he thought, opening his eyes and orienting himself toward the pull. 'The tower might be beyond the horizon, but I know which way to walk.'
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Arthur began descending the broad staircase that aligned with his Core's pull.
'I guess this is the field the drawings were depicting,' he realized as he neared the bottom of the staircase.
What the worn carvings had suggested were meadows of grass or flowers was now revealed in its true form. Stretching in every direction, covering the ground in a dense carpet of withered vegetation, were roses—dead and desiccated, yet somehow retaining their form. Their once-vibrant petals had faded to a dull, ashen gray. Thorny stems, brittle with age, still stood upright as though frozen in time at the moment of their death.
The dead rose field extended to the horizon in all directions, creating a stark, monochromatic landscape beneath the bright sun.
Curious, Arthur crouched at the edge of the bottom step, reaching toward one of the roses to examine it more closely. As his fingers neared the withered bloom, a sudden, sharp pain lanced through his skull.
He recoiled, hands shooting up to grasp his head as a mind-splitting headache formed without warning. The pain radiated outward from the center of his brain, intense enough to blur his vision and make his knees buckle.
But the physical agony was quickly overshadowed by something far more terrifying.
An insatiable urge washed over Arthur—a desperate, all-consuming desire to pick one of the dead roses and... eat it.
The compulsion appeared in his mind fully formed, as though someone had planted it there—a voice whispering seductively in his ear, promising that consuming the flower would ease his pain, would make everything right again. The voice wasn't audible—not a sound he heard with his ears—but a thought that seemed to originate both from within his own mind and from somewhere else simultaneously.
Take it... just one petal on your tongue... the pain will stop... everything will be clear again…
The temptation was overwhelming, drowning out rational thought. Arthur found himself reaching for the nearest bloom, his hand moving of its own accord while his conscious mind watched in horror. He wanted that rose—needed it more than anything he'd ever desired. The hunger for it eclipsed all other considerations, all warnings, all self-preservation instincts.
Yet beneath this foreign compulsion, a small part of Arthur's true consciousness remained—pushed to the periphery but still present, still fighting. That fragment of his authentic self was screaming in alarm, recognizing the wrongness of what was happening.
His Core sensed it too—reacting violently against the invasive influence. Arthur didn't understand how or why, but some deep instinct told him with absolute certainty: these roses reeked of corruption. Not the physical decay of dead plants, but the metaphysical taint of Void energy.
With monumental effort, Arthur wrenched control back from the compulsion. He stumbled backward, clawing his way up several steps of the temple stairs on hands and knees, desperate to put distance between himself and the corrupted field.
The moment he retreated to the stone steps, both the pain and the temptation vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. Arthur collapsed, gasping for breath, his body trembling with the aftermath of his narrow escape. Cold sweat soaked his tattered uniform as the realization of how close he'd come to corruption—to death or worse—settled over him.