Descent began not with footsteps, but with memory.
They stood on the edge of the Wound—a ravaged and forgotten scar in the ground that vibrated with a strange, pulsing thrum, the heartbeat of something long buried but far from dead. Obscure clouds curled above, a maelstrom of broken aether and torn essence, bleeding colors the eye could hardly identify.
Kael looked down, the heels of his boots inches from the serrated edge, where the ground fell away into a spiral of shattered obsidian stairs. They ratcheted on and on, curving like a serpent's spine deep into the abyss below.
"Elric wasn't wrong," Elira said quietly beside him, tracing the tip of her gauntlet over the edge of the Severance sigil now fouling her gauntlet. "There's not just power there. There's. memory, rot, and something even older than names."
Kael's gaze moved to hers. "We still go."
"Oh, of course we do."
