The voice slid from the shadows like oil. Vethis, the Skaafin Proctor, stepped into the fractured light. His skin was the grey of deep ocean, his eyes two chips of molten brass. He wore no weapon. He never needed one.
The galleries fell silent. The brass light in Vethis’s eyes flickered, dimmed, then flared bright gold.
Venn’s hands were shaking. The DV-s sigils along his forearms glowed faintly—the contract’s mark, binding him to finish or forfeit his remaining years.
“Go,” Vethis said. “The contract is fulfilled. No forfeit. No Prize. Just you, and your ghosts, and tomorrow.” DV-s The Skaafin Prize
“You came.”
He thought of the lover who had left. You don’t let anyone in.
Then he stood, and walked home, carrying everything. The voice slid from the shadows like oil
“The Prize,” Vethis purred, stepping through the memory like a ghost, “is the return of one thing you have lost. A person. A moment. A piece of your soul. But to claim it, you must choose which loss you value most. And then you must relive the others.”
“The DV-s contract is binding,” Venn said. “Complete your Trials. Claim your Prize. I’ve done three already.”
Venn walked through the door without looking back. Behind him, the Obsidian Galleries collapsed into silence, and Vethis sat alone in the dark, wondering if he had just lost or won something himself. He wore no weapon
He stood at the edge of the Obsidian Galleries, a cavern of polished volcanic glass that reflected his own scarred face back at him a thousand times. Somewhere in these echoing halls waited the Prize—and the one creature who could grant it.
“Ah, but the fourth is mine to design.” Vethis smiled, revealing teeth like carved bone. “And I have decided. You will not fight. You will not solve. You will remember. ”
Vethis crouched beside him. For a moment, the Proctor’s brass eyes held something almost like pity. “No one ever can. That is why the Skaafin Prize has been claimed only three times in a thousand years. Most choose to stop. They leave with nothing but the weight of remembering.”
The glass walls rippled. Suddenly Venn was no longer in the galleries. He was back in the salt-flat village of his childhood, the day the fever took his younger sister. He watched his twelve-year-old self hold her hand as she slipped away, helpless.