The descent began just before dawn.
Riku moved ahead of the others, bootsteps soft against the stone spiral that led beneath the southern ridge. The air was heavier this time, not just with heat but with something closer to weight—a presence lingering in the curvature of the tunnel. The sealed door they'd found days earlier still stood untouched, but they hadn't come to break it.
They came to bypass it.
Kael had found the secondary shaft two nights ago, hidden behind a sloped bed of collapsed stone near the steam fractures. A narrow slit of black, half-choked with dust, invisible unless you knew the shape of pressure-smoothed stone. It spiraled beneath the main chasm like an artery.
Riku dropped through the gap in silence. The others followed without question.
The tunnels weren't built by hand. That much was clear early on. They curved too precisely. The walls bore no tool marks. But they weren't molten either. This was engineered flow—obsidian smooth, ribbed at intervals for no reason Kael could explain. The deeper they went, the more the heat faded, replaced by dry pressure and a strange silence that held like a lid over water.
Sira took point after the first turn, moving ahead with a glowless flare—a dull blue shimmer, no brighter than the breath of a dying coal. Just enough to see. Not enough to alert.
Riku ran his fingers along the tunnel wall. The smoothness ended in patches—worn segments, ground rough by something large that had passed frequently. Not claws. Not hooves. Flat. Repetitive.
"Wheeled movement," Kael whispered behind him. "More than once. Different weights."
Machines? Carts? Supply runners?
Sira stopped ahead.
"Another fork."
Riku moved beside her. The tunnel split three ways—each mouth identical. No markings. No signs. Just void.
But one of them smelled of dust.
Not stone-dust. Air-dust. Like something had disturbed old sediment.
"This one," Riku said, stepping into the left path.
They walked for a long time.
No beasts. No traps. Just tunnel. And yet the air felt thinner with every step.
Riku slowed as the corridor widened unexpectedly. A small dome chamber opened into view, no taller than a forge vault, but twice as wide. Along its walls were embedded metallic ribs—dead conduits. Their ends curled into the floor like melted roots.
Kael crouched near one. "Energy dispersal system. Pre-industrial design, but not primitive."
Sira walked to the center. Her boot knocked something.
They all paused.
Riku knelt and picked it up.
A plate.
Flat, palm-sized, blackened with oxidation, but unmistakable: a fragment of sovereign armor.
Not Ash Veil. Not Kael's alloy. Different. Older. Engraved on one corner was a stylized emblem—burnt almost to nothing but still visible: a horned crown inside a broken circle.
Riku stood slowly. "This wasn't a dig site."
Kael straightened. "It was a refuge."
They turned as one as a low moan echoed through the dome. Not a voice—air being pulled somewhere further below. A shift in pressure.
Then, sound.
Not words. Not metal. Not growling.
Stone against stone. Sliding.
From the wall opposite them, a panel lowered an inch. No door. Just a slab that moved.
Sira raised her glaive.
Riku didn't flinch.
They watched as the slab slid open to reveal a shaft—black and vertical, lined with clawed grooves and faint orange veins of unknown material.
Heat breathed up from within. Not wild heat. Controlled.
Riku stepped toward it and looked down.
Nothing. No light. No movement.
But he felt something—deep in his bones.
A tug. Familiar. Too familiar.
It wasn't just construction.
Something in this place had once belonged to him.
No—to a monarch.
He turned sharply. "We mark this and leave."
Kael blinked. "Now? After that just opened?"
"Yes," Riku said. "This place is either a gift or a grave. And I don't trust gifts that open themselves."
They didn't argue.
They ascended in silence.
When they emerged at last into the fading light, the basin hadn't changed. Blackridge still stood like a scar on the horizon.
But in his mind, Riku could still feel the breath of that deep shaft—still taste the iron in the air that hadn't moved in decades.
And he knew—without fold, without map, without signal—
That someone else had walked those halls before.
And not all of them had left.