The map bled as it guided.
By dawn, the scroll had wept a full pattern—a final inkflow that curled along its edge, spiraling south by southeast, down what should have been an old mine trench filled in months ago. But Riku knew. This route hadn't opened on the map.
It had opened because of it.
They moved before sunbreak. Riku led the descent himself, flanked by Kael and Sira, with two elite warband shadows trailing silent in their wake. The air thickened early—before they reached the gorge proper—and smelled of coalstone and iron that hadn't been mined in decades.
The fissure was waiting.
No one had seen it the day before. But now, where the ground once pressed flat against fossil roots, a sliver of a passage yawned just wide enough to accept them, like the Hollow itself had parted its ribs to let Riku through.
Kael tested the edges of the opening. "Cut clean. This wasn't erosion."
"No tool marks," Sira murmured.
"Then it wasn't cut," Kael said.
Riku said nothing. He moved first.
The descent curved immediately.
It wasn't a slope—it spiraled. Almost polite in its grade, like the world wanted them to keep walking, to not notice how far they dropped. The stone underfoot warmed slightly with each turn. Not painfully. Not unnaturally. Just… reminded you it was alive.
The deeper they went, the less their lights mattered.
Because light was already there.
A red-orange pulse—slow and steady—rose from somewhere below. It wasn't firelight. It was too still. And it didn't flicker.
After the sixth coil, the tunnel widened.
What met them was not ruin. Not cavern. It was a room. A chamber. Dug and shaped, but not carved. Its walls were a material none of them named—stone, yes, but veined like root, and slick as if it had once bled. Embedded in the walls were bones. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Human and not. Their placement was no accident; some were fused in reverent spirals, others locked at angles that suggested ritual or obedience.
One of the elites reached to examine a rib joint.
"Don't," Riku said.
He hadn't raised his voice, but it stopped the man mid-step.
At the center of the chamber sat the forge.
No vent.
No bellows.
No fuel.
But it burned.
A low, steady heat rose from its belly, and the stone around it glowed like embers trapped under glass. It was circular—perfectly so—and unlike any forge they'd built or seen. No soot. No rust. No decay.
Kael circled it, slow. "No input. No heat source. No exhaust."
"And yet," Sira whispered, "it lives."
Opposite the forge, set against the far wall where the veins of stone narrowed and converged like tributaries dying into a sea, stood the throne.
It was shaped not by hand, but by time. Petrified roots, twisted upward, had formed the seat, its back tall and slightly reclined as if meant for something both regal and exhausted. It looked… wrong in scale. Too large for any sovereign. Too small for any beast.
Upon it sat the crown.
Obsidian, untouched by dust.
It gleamed faintly, like wet ink.
No one moved.
Kael broke the silence first. "That wasn't here last time."
"No 'last time' exists," Sira said. "Not for this."
Riku stepped forward.
Each footfall echoed differently in the chamber—muted near the forge, sharp near the bones, soft near the throne. The crown didn't shimmer. It waited.
He reached.
The forge brightened.
Once.
Twice.
Then bloomed in sudden crimson. No wind. No roar. Just presence. A heat that didn't burn, but watched.
And then—
A voice.
Not mechanical.
Not system-born.
Not human.
"Return was never meant."
Riku froze.
The voice had come not from above, not from the walls, not from the forge. It had spoken from inside the chamber. From the stone. The root. The bones. Or perhaps all of them.
Sira drew her weapon. Kael stepped beside Riku.
But nothing moved.
The crown stayed still.
The flames dulled.
Silence returned.
Yet something had changed.
Riku didn't touch the crown. Not yet.
Instead, he turned to Kael. "Mark the path. Lock it. No one comes down here without me."
Kael didn't argue.
Sira's gaze lingered on the throne. "You think it was… one of us?"
"No," Riku said. "Not one of us."
He looked back at the petrified seat, at the bone-fused walls, at the forge that shouldn't burn but did.
"It was what came before."