Chapter 3: Crossing the Shroud

Chapter 3: Crossing the Shroud

Chase didn't go back to the bar. He went back to his third-floor walk-up, a room that was less a home and more a holding cell for his guilt. The place smelled of stale whiskey and regret. Empty bottles stood clustered on the floor like glass tombstones. Piles of books on arcane theory and elemental dynamics lay gathering dust, mocking him with the memory of a time when he’d believed in something more than his next drink.

He sat on the edge of his lumpy mattress, the single bare bulb overhead casting long, dancing shadows. In one hand, he held a half-empty bottle of cheap bourbon. In the other, he held Mordred’s matte black card.

The bourbon offered a familiar, comforting numbness. A slow descent into the quiet dark. The card offered… something else. An unknown. A faster way to the grave, Mordred had said. A suicide with meaning.

Desire: He wanted an out. For years, that out had been the bottle. It was a slow, cowardly exit, a drawn-out apology to a ghost who couldn't hear it. But looking at the card, a different kind of desire flickered to life. Not for oblivion, but for a target. Mordred’s words echoed in his mind: a sledgehammer to break down a wall. He was tired of breaking himself. The thought of breaking something else, something that deserved it, was a heady poison all its own.

Obstacle: Cynicism was a hard habit to break. His mind screamed that it was a trap. Mordred, the great betrayer of legend, offering a job? It was ludicrous. A con. Some powerful mage looking for a disposable pawn to throw at a problem he didn't want to solve himself. It was a choice between a familiar hell and a potentially worse one. He raised the bottle to his lips, the scent of alcohol a siren’s song. But the image of the world frozen in time, of Mordred’s ancient, weary eyes, held him back. What did he have left to lose? His dignity was long gone. His future was a smudged charcoal drawing of more rooms like this, more bottles, more pointless brawls.

He looked at his left hand, at the ugly, puckered scar on his palm. The permanent reminder of the day his raw power, his pride, had taken everything from him. Lily. Her name was a constant ache behind his ribs. He had been trying to show off, to bend reality into a pretty shape for her. Instead, he had shattered it.

This life wasn't penance. It was just a slow rot. Mordred had offered him a different kind.

Action: With a surge of bitter resolve, Chase set the bottle down on the floor. It rolled away, coming to a stop against a stack of unpaid bills. He held the black card up in the dim light, the strange symbol of the dragon and sword seeming to absorb the gloom around it. He took a deep breath, held the card between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, and snapped it.

Result/Surprise: The card didn't just break. It imploded with a sound like tearing silk and shattering crystal. A pinprick of absolute blackness appeared in the air before him, then violently ripped open. It wasn't a shimmering portal of fantasy novels; it was a wound in the fabric of his reality. Jagged edges of non-space flickered and writhed, and through the vertical tear, there was no swirling vortex of colour, only a deep, starless twilight.

A gust of wind billowed out, carrying a scent that made the hair on his arms stand up. It was the smell of ozone from a lightning strike, the damp petrichor of ancient stones, and a faint, cloying sweetness of decay, like forgotten flowers in a tomb. It was the scent of old, tired magic.

Standing on the other side of the tear, silhouetted against the strange gloom, was Mordred. He was exactly as Chase had last seen him, his tailored suit unruffled, his expression patient.

"I was beginning to think you'd chosen the bottle," Mordred said, his voice echoing slightly, as if coming from a great distance. "Step through, Mr. Ambrose. The Shroud is not meant to be held open for long."

Chase hesitated for only a second. He glanced back at his squalid room, at the life he was leaving behind. There was nothing there for him. Nothing but ghosts. He squared his shoulders and stepped through the wound in the world.

The transition was nauseating. It felt like being pulled through television static, his body dissolving into a million buzzing particles and being violently reassembled on the other side. His vision blurred, his ears popped, and the chaotic magic inside him—the Itch—flared in protest, like a compass needle spinning wildly near a powerful magnet.

Turning Point: Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. His boots hit solid ground with a wet slap. He was standing in an alleyway, but it wasn't one of his world. The rain here was heavier, with a faint, oily luminescence that made the puddles on the broken cobblestones shimmer with rainbow hues. The architecture was a schizophrenic jumble of ancient, moss-covered stone and corroded iron beams from which hung bizarre contraptions of brass and copper.

The air was thick, tasting of metal and magic. He looked up. The sky was a bruised purple, perpetually overcast, with no sign of a sun or moon. Illumination came from the city itself. Signs written in a flowing, runic script sputtered and buzzed, their light not from neon gas, but from fist-sized crystals embedded in glass tubes, glowing with captured energy in shades of eerie green, electric blue, and angry crimson. A low, constant hum pervaded everything, the sound of a million magical devices running at once.

"Welcome to Avalon," Mordred said, his voice sounding normal again. "Or what's left of it. The capital district, at least."

Chase took it all in, his cynicism battling with a sense of profound wonder. This wasn't a mystical paradise. It was a gritty, exhausted dimension, a magical metropolis in the final stages of urban decay. He saw a hulking, four-legged creature made of brass and enchanted gears clank by, its single optic glowing as it swept the street with blasts of compressed air. A golem street-sweeper. This place was real.

Mordred led him out of the alley and onto a wider thoroughfare. Figures hurried past, a strange mix of humans in drab, functional clothing and other beings Chase couldn't name—tall, slender figures with pointed ears and skin the colour of polished obsidian, stout, bearded folk who grumbled in a guttural tongue.

"This way," Mordred said, leading him towards a towering, dark-stone building that looked like a cross between a cathedral and a power station. They entered a lift that ascended without a sound or shudder, propelled by a glowing glyph on the floor. The doors opened onto a wide, windswept balcony near the building's summit.

Ending: From here, Chase could see everything. The city sprawled below them, a web of glowing streets and dark alleys. But his eyes were drawn to the horizon, to the sight that dominated the landscape.

To his right stood a breathtaking, terrifying vision: New Camelot. It was a forest of impossible towers, gleaming structures of steel, glass, and shimmering crystal that clawed at the purple sky. They were interconnected by elegant, glowing bridges, and tiny, light-craft zipped between them. It was perfect, sterile, and utterly inhuman, glowing with a cold, controlled light that felt like a rebuke to the messy decay of the city around it. It was a diamond cage.

And to the left, nestled against the pristine city like a cancerous growth, was its antithesis. The skeleton of Old Camelot. The legendary castle was a jagged black silhouette against the gloom. Broken towers stood like shattered teeth. Crumbling ramparts and gaping archways were choked with dark, creeping vines. No lights shone from its windows. It was a place of profound death and silence, yet Chase could feel something radiating from it, even from this distance. A palpable aura of grief, of ancient rage, a resonant frequency that made the scar on his palm ache with a deep, sympathetic throb. It was the rot Mordred had spoken of.

"There it is, Ambrose," Mordred's calm voice cut through his awe. "The glorious, sterile future, and the rotting, haunted past." He gestured from the gleaming towers to the crumbling ruins. "Our job is to stand in the gutter that runs between them."