[BL] I Didn't Sign Up For This Chapter 68: In Which Reality’s Trash Heap Surrounds Us

We kept walking.

Or at least, I thought we were walking. My legs moved, my feet touched sothing that might have been ground, but there was no sense of getting anywhere. The gray never changed, never varied, it just stretched on forever in every direction.

"How long have we been in here?" I asked.

Azryth’s eyes flickered with that internal awareness demon lords apparently had. "Fourteen minutes."

I stopped walking. "That’s impossible, we’ve been walking for at least two hours."

"By your perception, yes. But my chronoter says fourteen minutes." He touched my arm. "Ti doesn’t work the sa here, your mind experiences one thing, your body another. The disconnection only gets worse the longer we stay."

"Great," I muttered. "Add temporal confusion to the list."

The compass needle held steady, pointing us forward through the nothing.

Then the gray began to shift.

Not dramatically, just gradually, like fog thinning, shapes started appearing in the distance, dark silhouettes against the emptiness.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Debris," Azryth said, his voice tight. "Things that fell into limbo and couldn’t get out."

As we got closer, the shapes beca clearer.

Buildings, or pieces of buildings. A chunk of Gothic cathedral floated past us, complete with flying buttresses and stained glass windows that still caught light that didn’t exist. Next to it, half a skyscraper, its steel fra twisted and broken, office furniture still visible through shattered windows.

"Where did all this co from?" I whispered.

"From destroyed realms or failed dinsions, places that collapsed and their pieces ended up here." He steered us around a floating section of cobblestone street. "Limbo is where reality disposes of things it doesn’t know what to do with."

The debris field expanded around us, we were walking through a graveyard of worlds now.

I saw a piece of forest suspended in the void, trees still green and swaying despite there being no wind. A fragnt of what looked like an alien city hovered nearby, all impossible geotry and crystalline structures that hurt to look at directly.

Further out, I caught glimpses of a Roman aqueduct, a stretch of highway complete with abandoned cars, sothing that might have been part of a space station.

"Don’t touch anything," Azryth warned. "So of these fragnts are still active."

"Active?"

"They rember what they were, sotis they try to impose their reality onto ours." He pulled away from a piece of shoreline where waves crashed against nothing. "Touch the wrong fragnt and you could get pulled into its collapsed dinsion, trapped in a reality that already died."

I kept my hands close after that.

We navigated through the wreckage in silence. The compass led us on a winding path between the larger pieces, threading through gaps in the impossible architecture.

A dieval castle tower floated past, its pennants still flying, a section of jungle grew sideways out of nothing, monkeys chattering in branches that had no roots. I saw what looked like part of an underwater city, complete with swimming fish trapped in a sphere of ocean.

"How long has all this been here?" I asked.

"So of it? Millennia. So of it might have fell in yesterday." Azryth guided us past a chunk of crystalline structure that pulsed with alien energy. "Ti doesn’t an anything in limbo, everything that falls in just stays. Forever."

The debris grew denser, we were surrounded now by fragnts from dozens, maybe hundreds of different realities. All of them broken, all of them lost.

I saw a piece of what might have been a library, books still on shelves that led to nowhere. A fragnt of volcanic landscape, lava flowing in defiance of any law of physics, sothing that looked like it had been carved from pure light, geotric and beautiful and completely wrong.

The compass needle shifted slightly, adjusting our path.

"We’ve been walking for hours," I said.

"Twenty-three minutes," Azryth corrected.

My brain couldn’t reconcile those two truths. It felt like hours, my legs ached like I’d been walking for hours, but Azryth’s chronoter said otherwise.

"This is going to drive insane," I muttered.

"That’s part of limbo’s function, it breaks down your ability to trust your own perceptions." His hand tightened on mine. "Stay anchored to the binding, that’s real. Everything else is suspect."

We passed through a particularly dense cluster of debris. Fragnts from what looked like a dozen different Earths, or things like Earth, all jumbled together. I saw Big Ben floating next to what might have been the Taj Mahal, except wrong sohow. A piece of the Great Wall twisted around a fragnt of Egyptian pyramid.

"Is there anything limbo won’t absorb?" I asked.

"Living things, mostly, they die before they can be preserved." Azryth’s voice was grim. "Everything you see here, these places were empty when they fell. No people, no animals, just architecture and landscape. The inhabitants were already gone."

A cheerful thought.

The debris field seed endless, every direction I looked, more fragnts, more pieces of dead worlds floating in gray nothing.

Then I noticed sothing.

The fragnts were orienting themselves, slowly rotating, all turning to face the sa direction.

"Azryth," I said. "Look."

He followed my gaze. "They’re aligning."

"Why?"

"It seems sothing’s pulling at them, sothing with significant gravitational presence." He checked the compass. "Which way is the needle pointing?"

I looked down. The needle was pointing in the sa direction the debris was facing.

"Straight ahead," I said.

"Then that’s where we’re going." But he didn’t sound happy about it. "Whatever’s causing this... it’s powerful enough to affect all of limbo’s debris. That’s not a small thing."

We kept walking, following the compass deeper into the field.

The fragnts grew larger the further we went, not just pieces anymore, whole buildings, entire landscapes, vast sections of reality all suspended in the nothing.

I saw a complete city block, frozen in ti. An entire forest, trees reaching hundreds of feet high, a mountain, snow-capped and massive, hanging in the void like it weighed nothing.

"This doesn’t make sense," I said. "If these are destroyed realms, how are there such big pieces? Shouldn’t they have broken apart more?"

"Not if they fell in recently." Azryth’s eyes scanned the debris. "Or if they were deliberately preserved, sotis powerful entities store things in limbo, and hide them where they can’t be found."

"What kind of things?"

"Weapons, artifacts, entire civilizations they want to keep but can’t allow to exist in stable reality." He pointed to a floating palace made of what looked like frozen fla. "That, for instance. Soone put that here on purpose."

The palace was beautiful and terrible, every surface burned with cold fire, but nothing consud, just eternal burning without fuel or heat.

We gave it a wide berth.

The compass led us on, deeper into the debris field, the fragnts were packed tighter now, leaving less empty space between them. We were navigating a maze of dead worlds.

My perception of ti was completely shot, every ti I thought an hour had passed, Azryth would tell it had been minutes. The disconnection was making dizzy.

"How are you handling this?" I asked him. "The ti thing."

"Practice. I’ve been in limbo before, rember? You learn to trust the chronoter over your senses." He squeezed my hand. "Focus on sothing concrete, the compass, the binding, the feel of the ground under your feet. It helps anchor you."

I tried. Focused on the brass compass warm in my hand, the binding pulsing steadily between us, the sensation of walking even if the destination never seed to get closer.

It helped a little.

The debris field shifted around us. New fragnts appearing, old ones fading into the gray, like limbo itself was rearranging its collection.

Then the compass needle swung hard to the left.

"This way," I said.

We changed direction, following the new heading.

The debris thinned, we were moving out of the densest part of the field now, entering an area where the fragnts were more scattered.

And ahead of us, the gray was changing again.

Getting darker, heavier, like we were approaching sothing that pulled at the void itself.

"Whatever’s ahead," Azryth said quietly, "it’s big."

The compass needle stayed locked on that direction.

Unwavering.