before the waking
The Keepers who did not return
The Barrow of Pestilence holds the names of earlier Keepers: all of them reached the gate, not one of them climbed back up.
Eras
The Keeper is not the first to go down to the Source. Under the barrow in the Heart of the Blight lie the names of those who came before — and Lumi answers them exactly as the world does: they got there and they chose, they simply chose wrong.
Hence the price of the last chapter: the choice at the bottom is not invented for effect, it was made before you — and by those names you can see how it ends if you choose wrongly.
The same article in Russian — русская версия — carries the game’s own lines word for word.