The Australian outback didn't feel like a place on Earth. It felt older. The red earth stretched to a horizon warped by heat, under a sky so vast and blue it felt like a physical weight. The air itself was thick, humming with the buzz of invisible insects and a deep, resonant silence that had witnessed epochs come and go. Aria, Kai, and Logan stood at the edge of a seemingly endless plain of spinifex grass and skeletal gum trees, their jeep a tiny, incongruous speck behind them.
This was the place Soren's knowledge-echo had led them. The "Unaligned" had pointed not to another hidden chamber or a mystical forest, but to this stark, sun-baked emptiness. According to the fragmented lore, the Walkara, the oldest known custodians of the Dreaming, had retreated here when the world of men and the world of ancient pacts began to diverge. They were the keepers of the "Law Before Laws."
