The shadow‑vines on the cavern walls, torn by Karrion's rune‑hammer and Thalia's shadow‑blades with a bone‑chilling rasp, finally wilted into a quivering pool of black sludge. The chamber fell silent once more, save for the three of them panting heavily in the cramped space.
Karrion leaned on his warhammer, cold sweat beading on his brow as black ichor welled again at his left shoulder wound.
"Blast this place… even the rock wants to eat us."
Thalia pressed her back against the wall, the rise and fall of her body beneath the cloak betraying how much strength the last fight had cost her. She cast a glance at Raine, still slumped weakly on the floor, his face ashen.
"We can't stay here," Karrion rasped, sweeping his gaze around. "This is only one trap layered atop another."
He strode to a seemingly solid section of wall and tapped it with his hammer's haft.
"A dwarf's instinct… this rock feels different."
Raine tried to stand, but Thalia's hand on his shoulder held him down.
"Save your strength," she said, voice cool yet edged with fatigue. "Let him do it."
Karrion drew a deep breath, steeling himself against the pain in his shoulder. With both hands he gripped the hammer's shaft, Rune‑fire flickering faintly at its head—far dimmer than before, yet still potent.
"For the old forges—open!"
With a roar, he smashed the hammer into the wall.
BOOM!
Stone splintered, dust and rubble spraying everywhere. A yawning crack appeared, revealing an even deeper, downward‑leading fissure. A blast of air—stale leaves and ancient dust—washed over them: thicker, fouler, yet strangely free of the living malice above.
"Go!" Karrion plunged into the gap, his lantern bobbing in the dark.
Thalia hauled Raine up and followed. The fissure narrower still, its floor slick with moss and strange fungi. Each hand‑and‑foot move was a cautious scramble downwards.
After what felt like ages, the passage widened. Karrion paused; his lantern beam swept upward.
"Look above… what's that structure?"
Raine followed the light and his heart jolted. Through the upper crevices he spied massive, worked stone blocks—weathered carving along their edges. These were no natural formations. They were ruins.
"It…it's an ancient structure," Karrion cried, awe mingling with dread. "Look at that style… it's… Starborn craft!"
He pressed forward, scaling faintly hewn steps in the rock.
The higher they climbed, the more obvious the artificer's hand. Broken archways, toppled columns, and star‑patterned stone slabs littered the ground. The stench of corruption grew heavier, as though this outpost had been ground beneath the forest's malignant toe.
At last they emerged onto a broad platform. Though the walls stood half‑collapsed and engulfed by black slime and fungus, enough remained to show this had been a sturdy watchstation, built into the mountain to guard a pass. Now it lay in ruin—bones of stone gnawed by some colossal beast.
All around, corruption clung to every surface. Black ichor oozed from fissures, carrying a sickly‑sweet stench. A few twisted, monstrous trees had erupted through the rubble, their limbs quaking in the still air.
"A Starborn outpost…" Karrion whispered, voice thick with regret and hatred.
"Truly… devoured by corruption."
Raine surveyed the silent wasteland. Stepping onto the platform, he felt it—an undeniable resonance.
Invisible strings reached from the heart of the ruins, plucking at the hidden core of his soul. His Starborn blood roared to life, pounding in his veins like war drums.
Vrrr—
A low, intimate hum vibrated within his mind. Then an onslaught of emotions:
Despair, as if drowning beneath ice‑cold waves without end.
• Defiance, the warriors' final cry, flames striking stone, a last, flaming stand.
• Agony, flesh torn, spirit corroded, the mind warped by unspeakable torment.
• Oblivion, the void swallowing all, leaving only hollow emptiness.
"Ugh…" Raine moaned, staggering, blood at his lips, sweat whitening his skin. He had, in an instant, waded through the final throes of the outpost's defenders.
"Karrion!" he heard.
The dwarf's sturdy grip seized him. "You alright?"
Thalia knelt beside him, hooded eyes full of concern and… sympathy? Her fingers flickered with shadow‑energy, seeking to steady his ravaged mind.
"I… felt it," Raine gasped, voice ragged. "The residue… too strong… their despair… their agony."
Karrion frowned, easing Raine against a cleaner stretch of wall.
"Bloodbond? The Starborn all react this way here?"
Thalia stood, offering Raine a waterskin. Her gloved hand, though cold, carried a faintly soothing shadow.
"Steady your heart. Do not drown in those echoes—they are but remnants of the past."
Raine drank deeply, the cool water stanching some of the tide's strength, though the undercurrent remained—a viper coiled in his blood.
"We must search," Raine insisted. He pushed himself upright. "Something remains here."
Karrion nodded, sweeping away a tangle of fungus to reveal mottled floor‑stone.
"Be careful—corruption here runs deep. Don't touch everything."
Thalia moved silently, focusing on zones where shadow‑energy still clung.
The ruins sprawled vast, choked by debris and creeping corruption. Most traces lay buried beneath twisted vines and slick growth, corruption gluing everything in place.
"Over here!" Karrion's call came from scorched relics.
He uncovered a warped metal insignia—a comet with seven smaller stars, its craftsmanship blurred by decay. "Starborn crest… a legion's badge."
Raine traced its cold edges. A flicker of unwilling anger pulsed through the metal.
"Look at this," Thalia said from a crumbled wall, revealing a half‑embedded spear blade—its haft turned obsidian by encrusting crystalline growth. Faded runes glowed faintly with residual Starfire magic, now tainted.
Raine knelt to inspect. "Corrupted arms."
They pressed on, uncovering broken armor shards, charred arrows, and unidentifiable metal fragments—uniformly ravaged by rot. Each fragment spoke silently of brutal conflict and the defenders' doom.
"Wait… what's this?" Karrion halted at a partially intact stele. He peeled away writhing vines to expose weathered glyphs.
"A marker, perhaps?" He cleared grime to reveal lines and curves pointing a direction. "Like an ancient dwarven star‑chart… yet unlike any I've seen."
Raine joined him, squinting at the runes. Faintly, he recognized a vector toward the deeper forest—toward the floating fragments of the fabled Skyfall City.
"Skyfall City…" he breathed.
"Yet these glyphs… blurred," Karrion noted, pointing to an inky veneer of shadow coating the stone. "Dark tampering… someone hid this path."
Thalia traced the smear with her gloved finger, wincing. "An ancient shadow‑seal, not mere rot. An intelligence masked these signs."
The trail grew cold. The arrow to Skyfall had been scrubbed away. Other finds were too fragmentary to guide them. Raine's heart sank—had all this peril been for nothing?
Yet then Raine felt it again—an echo far more potent emanating from the ruin's center.
It throbbed with a star‑touched energy, twisted by madness, beckoning him closer.
"I'll go," Raine announced, drawn forward.
"Karrion, wait!" Thalia strove to hold him back, but Raine slipped away, boots scraping the stone. Karrion followed, wary.
Each step into the center ramped up Raine's bloodbond resonance. The raw emotions coalesced not into drowning terror but sharpened visions—shards of history in vivid color.
He saw silver‑armored Starborn soldiers under flickering starlight, clashing with writhing shadow‑fiends.
He felt their cries, the steel's ring, the flash of runes against blackness.
He watched a towering Starborn hero raise a flaming starlight blade—his face a mirror of Raine's own ancestor.
But as the hero struck, the sky tore open in inky darkness, a colossal malignant eye opened, snuffing out every star, every defender—drowning hope in a tide of corruption.
"No—!" Raine croaked, his mind reeling as that single, all‑seeing eye bore into him.
Pain exploded behind his eyes—steel shards of agony drilling into his skull.
With a tortured gasp, Raine collapsed.
"Karrion!" Thalia's cry echoed.
The dwarf scooped him into his arms. "Hold on, lad!"
Thalia knelt, her eyes bleak as she laid a hand on Raine's brow. Shadow‑energy glimmered, battling the echoes in his mind, but the gale raging in his blood would not be quelled easily.
The ruined station's silence pressed in: a mausoleum of the fallen, poisoned by time and rot.
Here lay the testament of ancestors on their last stand—betrayed and undone by creeping corruption and the very shadows that devoured them.
No clear path to Skyfall remained—only these fractured memories, these echoes of star‑fire and suffering.
Raine lay unconscious, corpses of runes and stone around him whispering dark secrets.
They had come seeking answers, yet the forest's whispers offered only ruin and despair.
And in that pregnant silence, the true cost of Starborn heritage—its brilliance and its curse—hung over them like a blade, ready to fall.