My voice booms down the tunnel, bone mask amplifying every syllable until it shakes dust from the ceiling. Fire crawls over my skin, wrapping me in a second, writhing armor.
My fire wings tear from my back in a storm of sparks, eight feet wide and burning.
“I AM HERE FOR YOU!”
Silence answers at first.
Then a laugh.
It slithers out of the darkness ahead—dry, humorless, full of old malice. The torches lining the tunnel sputter, their flames turning an ugly green as the temperature drops a fraction.
“You came yourself,” a voice purrs, echoing off the stone. “How fortunate. I was beginning to think you valued your new pet more than your Vein.”
I move forward, every step cracking the stone, my own flames devouring the sickly corruption clinging to the walls.
“Show yourself, coward,” I snarl. “Or are you sending only puppets now?”
“Oh, I sent puppets,” Idris says mildly. “Many puppets. But for you, Thorne of the Broken Plains? I thought I would make an exception.”
The tunnel widens into a chamber.
A guard node—one of the many junctions where ore is transferred, cataloged, dispatched. It should be full of miners and ward-keepers.
Checkpoints. Security.
It is empty.
Empty, except for the bodies.
Miners lie where they fall, skin bruised and waxen, eyes open and glassy.
There is almost no blood.
Their veins are blackened, as if something corrosive burned them from the inside out.
The cinder ore containers stacked along the walls are cracked. Not broken, not spilled.
Drained.
My fire snarls. The bone mask tightens against my face like a second skull.
“You desecrate my people and my Vein,” I say, voice low and lethal. “You know how this ends.”
A figure steps from the far shadows—tall, robed in bone-white and soot black, staff made of twisted spines clutched in one hand.
His skin is pale as old parchment. His eyes are pits of ink. Around him, the air writhes with thin, whispering shapes—half-formed, half-forgotten souls that never should have been ripped from their rest.
Idris in the flesh.
The Dark Sage, once monk of the Silver Flame, now carrion priest of all that should have stayed dead.
“My, my,” he murmurs, tilting his head. “You’ve grown since last we spoke, little spark.”
“I am not the one begging ore from the dead,” I growl.
“No.” He smiles, and it is a terrible thing. “You are the one chained to a dying purpose. Still feeding the forges so that ungrateful worlds can dream their little dreams. Still pretending service is the same as freedom.”
Around us, The Ember Vein pulses.
