Walls began to rise.
Not built. Not summoned. They simply manifested—stone and structure bleeding up from the nothing between tiles, forming around the path like memory solidifying into architecture. Their surfaces were rough, a patchwork of cracked black stone and crystalline bone, threaded through with pulsing red veins that beat faintly beneath the surface, like heartlines wired into the Expanse itself.
The walls didn't rise alone.
They spiraled upward, stretching into a single massive structure—twisting like a tower of vertebrae. Jagged. Uneven. Alive in the way old things are alive. Its silhouette loomed over the void, each sharp angle catching fragments of starlight torn from the sky above. Ancient gothic spires broke along its crown—more ruins than design, but none of them fallen.
It stood like a monument to decay.
Like a fortress carved from the skeleton of something older.
Then a gate dropped in front of them.
