Location: Tashlan, Carlon – Catacombs | Year 8002 A.A., Evening
"Every kingdom has its crown, but every crown casts a shadow. Those who live in the shadow are the true measure of the crown's weight." – Old Carlonian Proverb
Tashlan, the gilded capital of Carlon, stood like a jewel balanced precariously upon the jagged spine of Mount Seraxis. From afar, its marble towers and copper-gilded domes gleamed like a city woven out of light itself, so radiant that pilgrims whispered the gods had once set their throne upon those heights. The higher the eye climbed, the more the city appeared to reach into eternity—tier upon tier, balcony upon balcony, like a ladder daring to scale the heavens.
Yet, as with all ladders, someone must always stand on the lowest rung.
Carlon's doctrine was carved into its very stones: power above, suffering below. Those who dwelt in the upper tiers lived in opulence, their palaces brushed with golden dust, their windows gazing over seas of clouds. But the higher they rose, the deeper their foundations sank. Beneath the sunlit heights stretched the dark underbelly of Tashlan, a rot as old as conquest.
The catacombs.
They lay carved into the mountain's base like an endless wound, where light seldom ventured and the air itself seemed reluctant to dwell. To the nobles above, the catacombs were spoken of only in whispers, as though to acknowledge their existence was to invite the stain of their misery. They were not prisons in name, for Carlon's laws prided themselves on "mercy." Yet here were sent the broken, the undesirable, the defeated—the ones too dangerous to kill, too inconvenient to free.
It was said that to enter the catacombs was to become a shadow.
Torches guttered weakly against the vastness of the stone corridors, their flames throwing shuddering silhouettes upon crumbling walls. Every surface seemed to weep: water trickled endlessly from unseen cracks, dripping into stagnant pools that reflected the bars of a thousand cells. Rust clung to iron like moss, devouring the bars even as they still held strong.
The air itself was a burden. Thick with mildew, sour with unwashed bodies, heavy with breath that had nowhere to go. The stink of despair had settled into the very stones, and no flame, however bright, could drive it out.
Here were the remnants of Narn.
Male and female tracients once proud, once sovereign, reduced to murmuring shapes in the shadows. Some sat motionless, staring into nothing, their minds long fled beyond reach. Others whispered prayers—broken songs of ArchenLand, fragments of Narnan hymns, syllables that had lost their meaning but clung stubbornly to existence. Children huddled against their mothers, eyes already hollowed, learning the language of hopelessness before they could speak.
To walk here was to walk through the wreckage of a nation.
And yet, even in the silence of rot, there was something else. Something that endured, though beaten, though bruised. A tension in the air—like the faint note of a string pulled taut, a note inaudible but unyielding. It was not hope exactly, for hope seemed too bright a word for such places. It was something harder, rougher, but alive nonetheless.
Defiance.
It lingered like an ember among ashes, hidden in the gaze of a prisoner who refused to bow his head. In the whispered stories passed through the bars at night. In the stubborn rhythm of a heartbeat that refused to surrender, though surrounded by stone.
And for those who could feel it, the catacombs themselves seemed to breathe with that defiance. The walls, carved long ago, bore markings half-erased: sigils of Narn, scratched by desperate claws or carved by dull stones, as if to say we were here. Every symbol was a wound. Every wound, a witness.
For Carlon had built its glory on the bones of others. And bones do not forget.
In one such cell, a chamber not of iron bars but of ancient, magically-reinforced stone that drank the light and hope from the air, sat Kopa Boga. He was hunched against the damp wall, a monument of weary resilience carved from living wood and enduring spirit. The passage of uncounted years had wrought its changes upon him. The proud, branching antlers of his youth had grown massive and profound, spiraling into intricate, weathered crowns that seemed to map the long centuries of his life, their very substance humming with a low, patient thrum of latent mana. His fur, once a vibrant tapestry of Faun vitality, had dulled to the hue of ancient moss and thickened like the hide of an old oak, a testament to seasons endured. Yet, within that aged frame, his green eyes burned with an undimmed sharpness, alert and piercing, missing nothing in the oppressive gloom. Facial hair, coarse and gnarled like carved bark, framed his mouth, a beard hardened by the grit and silent vows of a hundred forgotten battles. As the former Hand of King Darius, a title that felt both like a lifetime ago and a weight he still carried in his very bones, he held himself with a stillness that was neither defeat nor submission, but a deep, listening readiness.
He listened now in a silence that was his alone, a practiced art of patience, as two Carlon guards, their arrogance making them careless, lingered outside his cell. They were oblivious to the fact that their hushed complaints were not whispers lost to stone, but vital intelligence, sustenance for a resistance that thrived on such carelessness. The very air seemed to lean in with him, carrying their words on its stagnant breath.
"Another slave transfer got hit," the first guard muttered, the dull clink of his poorly-maintained armor echoing softly as he adjusted his grip on a scimitar that had never seen an honest fight. His voice was a grating mix of boredom and unease. "East of the Seraxis Fork. The Ronins again. That's, what, the sixth this year?"
"Sixth?" the second guard grumbled, his voice deeper, wearier, as he leaned his weight against the cold wall with a sigh of resignation. "You ain't been payin' attention. More like the sixtieth. It's like they're ghosts, I tell you. Not a footprint, not a spent arrow to be found. They just... appear from the rock and the mist, vanish a dozen slaves from under our noses, and we're left cleanin' up the mess and explaining it to the overseers."
The first guard lowered his voice further, a conspiratorial tone that betrayed a superstitious fear. "Gotta be the Narn Lords. The stories my gran told... them and the ArchenLanders, they didn't just vanish a thousand years ago. They went to ground. Slept. And now, just as suddenly, Carlon starts bleedin' slaves from a thousand small cuts? It's not coincidence. It's them."
The second guard flinched, a sharp intake of breath hissing through his teeth. "Quiet, you fool! You want your tongue nailed to the gates? You wanna be flayed by the Prince?" The name was spoken with a palpable dread, a fear more immediate than any ghost story. "Erezhan's already madder than the Trisoc in a storm. These disappearances are makin' 'im desperate. And a desperate Prince is a dangerous thing for everyone, especially for us lot down here."
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Location: The Deeper Catacombs, The Iron Crossroads
Deeper in the labyrinthine belly of the mountain, the air grew colder, heavier, as if the weight of all the stone above was pressing down upon the soul. Here, the carefully laid blocks of the upper levels gave way to rough-hewn tunnels, the primal veins of Mount Seraxis where water dripped with a slow, maddening rhythm from unseen crevices in the ceiling. Each drop echoed in the profound silence, a liquid clock counting out an eternity of despair. Rust, like old, dried blood, etched intricate and terrible patterns across the iron bars of forgotten oubliettes, telling silent stories of decay and long, slow suffering.
At a junction where four such tunnels met—a place the guards called the Iron Crossroads—two Carlonites stood back to back, their nervous energy a stark contrast to the stagnant chill. Their breaths plumed in the air, small ghosts of their own fear. The torches here burned even lower, their light swallowed greedily by the pressing dark, making the shadows between them seem like solid things.
"They wouldn't come this deep," the younger one said, his voice a strained whisper that was immediately devoured by the dripping dark. He gripped his scimitar so tightly his knuckles were white moons against the grimy leather of his glove. He was trying to convince himself more than his companion.
The older guard, his face a roadmap of old scars and newer worries, didn't bother to turn. His eyes ceaselessly scanned the mouths of the four tunnels, each one a yawning portal into blackness. "Doesn't matter what they would or wouldn't do," he muttered, the words gritty with a fear that had curdled into grim acceptance. "You hear what happened at Galtan Hold? Not a transfer. A fortified outpost. Stone walls, twenty men. The Ronins didn't just hit it. They gutted it. Left the gates wide open and every man inside disarmed and sleeping like babes. We don't even know how they got in." The story was a tremor in his voice, a cold stone in the pit of his stomach.
It was then that the voice came. It did not echo. It did not shout. It was smooth, steady, and impossibly close, as if the speaker were standing in the very space between them.
"Drop your weapons. You won't be harmed."
The guards spun, a clumsy, frantic dance of alarm, their scimitars slicing through empty air. There had been no whisper of mana, no gathering of power, no sound of a footfall. There was only a silhouette materializing from the deepest pool of shadow near the tunnel mouth, as if the darkness itself had coalesced into a form. A cloak of some impossibly dark fabric seemed to swallow the torchlight, and the presence it contained was not one of rage or fury, but something far more unnerving: a cold, exact certainty.
"Who are you?!" the younger guard shrieked, the question bursting from him in a panic.
The figure's head tilted slightly, a gesture of profound, almost weary patience. The voice came again, the same even, dispassionate tone. "You already know."
Fear, sharp and immediate, overrode reason. With twin cries of desperation, the guards lunged, their blades aimed for the heart of the shadow.
The figure moved. But it was not the blinding speed of a mana-enhanced warrior, nor the chaotic flurry of a brawler. It was something else entirely. It was like watching absence. It was the moment between one heartbeat and the next given form. He seemed not to evade their strikes so much as to be precisely where the strikes were not.
A low, calm utterance cut through the grunts and the whistle of steel. "Swordless Style, First Claw: Yırtıcı."
There was no dramatic clash of metal. Only two sharp, precise cracks of impact, the sound of hardened knuckles meeting vulnerable nerve clusters at the base of two necks. Two scimitars clattered to the stone floor, the ringing of their fall a brief, sharp song in the dark. Two bodies followed, slumping into unconsciousness before they even understood they had been defeated.
The Tracient exhaled slowly, a plume of steam in the cold air, standing over their inert forms. The brief struggle had dislodged his hood. In the guttering firelight, his features were revealed. Orange fur, striped with patterns of sleek black, gleamed faintly. A terrible, jagged scar ran a brutal path down the right side of his face, a permanent record of some past catastrophe, and over his left eye was a simple black leather patch. His one visible eye, a cold, piercing gold, held no triumph, only a glint of restrained violence, a storm kept perpetually at bay. His yellow hair, longer now, was pulled back into a tight, functional ponytail at the base of his neck.
Without a second glance at the fallen guards, he melted back into the corridor's embrace, a shadow returning to shadow, leaving only the dripping water and the two men sleeping a forced, dreamless sleep.
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Location: The Guard Chamber, Outer Catacombs
In a chamber closer to the main holding pens, where the air was slightly less thick with the despair of the deepest pits but carried instead the stale boredom of routine, two more Carlonite guards dozed at their posts. Their silver armor, once meant to gleam with intimidating splendor, was dulled by neglect and a fine layer of subterranean grime. Their weapons—heavy, cruel-looking things—were propped against the wall within reach, but their confidence, like the metal, had been dulled by uneventful watches and the mind-numbing belief that nothing ever happened this close to the cells. They were guardians of a tomb, and they had begun to resemble its inhabitants.
They barely noticed the faint, verdant glow that began to seep from between the cracks in the flagstones. It was a light the color of new life in a place that knew only decay. From those narrow seams, small, determined plant buds sprouted, pushing upward against the immense weight of the mountain above as if it were nothing more than spring soil. They were delicate things, with petals of pure, magical light. And then, they released their bounty: a shimmering cloud of pollen that carried a scent incongruously sweet and cloying, like honeysuckle and forgotten summers.
The guards blinked, their heads lolling as if suddenly heavy. They swayed on their feet, their drowsy confusion giving way to a profound, irresistible lethargy. Without a cry, without a single drawn weapon, they collapsed onto the cold stone, sliding into a deep, enchanted slumber, their dreams likely the sweetest they had ever known in the service of Carlon.
From the shadows of a nearby archway, Kopa Boga stepped forward. The green luminescence around his hands, which had pulsed in time with the blooming plants, faded as he cloaked his mana once more, pulling the vibrant energy back within himself. He shed his hood, and in the dim light, his features were revealed to the faces now pressed against the bars of the cells lining the chamber. He was not a ghost or a demon of the deeps. He was something far more potent: a memory made flesh.
A gasp went through the refugees inside the cells. But it was not a sound of fear. It was the sharp, painful intake of breath that comes with recognition, with a hope so long buried it aches to see the light. Here was the line of Boga, the old nobility of a land they thought erased. In the set of his antlers, in the fierce green of his eyes, they saw the echoes of a king they had believed lost to history.
"I am Kopa Boga," he said, his voice firm and low, a sound that carried not by volume but by sheer authority, cutting through the silence. "Hand of King Darius Boga. If you want to live, follow me. Silently. Quickly."
He did not need to force the locks. At his subtle gesture, the ancient, rusted mechanisms of the chains and doors groaned and then yielded, not with a violent snap, but with a sigh, as if the very stone was weary of holding them. The doors creaked open. And in that sound, something else stirred, something that had been dormant in that place for a thousand years: hope.
They moved. A ragged, silent procession of the lost and found, following the Stag-Man through the oppressive dark.
They emerged into a wider, cavernous space. Here, the air changed. The cloying stench of stale rot and misery began to fade, replaced by something else—a current, faint but undeniable. A breeze. It was cold and carried the clean, sharp scent of wet rock and the outside night. Somewhere ahead, freedom was near.
The group paused instinctively, a collective breath held. Kopa raised a closed fist, signaling a absolute halt. His ears twitched, rotating minutely, filtering the sounds of the cavern: the drip of water, the ragged breathing of the refugees, the distant rumble of the city above.
"Why stop?" a young Felis youth whispered, her voice barely audible, her tail twitching with nervous energy.
Kopa did not answer immediately. His green eyes, sharp and ancient, scanned the impenetrable dark ahead of them, his head tilted as if listening to a voice only he could hear.
"They're late," he said finally, the words simple, yet laden with the weight of a plan thousands of days in the making.
As if summoned by his remark, a voice, smooth and familiar, echoed from above, from a ledge of a broken pillar that thrust down from the cavern ceiling. "Kopa. Over here."
A figure dropped from the gloom, landing on the cavern floor without a sound, as if gravity itself had hesitated to claim him. Kon Kaplan straightened. The torchlight from a single, dying sconce caught the sleek orange of his fur, making it gleam like a dying flame in the vast dark. The jagged scar on his face was a stark, brutal line, a history of pain written into his flesh. His single golden eye found Kopa's, and for a moment, the two old warriors simply looked at one another, a conversation passing between them in a glance.
Kopa raised a single, bushy eyebrow. "You're late."
"Detour," Kon replied, his voice a low rumble. He adjusted the strap on his sheathed blade with a casual, practiced flick of his wrist. "Cleaned up on the way." He gave a curt, almost imperceptible nod towards the huddled group of refugees, his gaze assessing their number, their condition, in a single sweep. "Let's move."
Without another word, they turned as one. The Ronins and their charges vanished into the waiting mouth of a final tunnel, their forms fading from sight into the deeper darkness, swallowed once more by the myth they were weaving.