The watchtower was now just a charred finger pointing at a sickly sky. Up close, the wounds in the stone were more obvious, more personal. Part of the structure had given way, turning one wall into a melancholy pile of rubble. The iron door, barely hanging on a corroded hinge, groaned with every breath of wind, as if telling a story too heavy to bear.
Elian slipped inside without hesitation, his survivor's instinct overpowering his fear. Kael and Liora exchanged a glance—that silent language they now mastered—before following. Kael first, his shadows preceding his steps, probing the darkness with an animal wariness.
The inside smelled like the end of the world. A thick dust, like bone ash, smothered everything. A broken table, a collapsed cot, and the remains of a guard, his tattered uniform still clinging to his skeleton. The death here was so old it had become discreet.
Kael (narration): "This was the epilogue of so many stories. A silence preceding oblivion. I knew that melody. I had hummed it all my life."
"The maps, Elian," murmured Liora, her voice a caress against the harshness of the place.
The boy was already in a corner, scratching at the floor with a feverish urgency. "Under the marked stone... he said it..." Kael joined him, his hand covering the boy's to lift the heavy slab.
Under the stone, not earth, but a rusted metal hatch, sealed by a locking wheel. And at its center, a symbol that stole Liora's breath: a stylized sun being invaded by vegetal tendrils. The emblem of the Greenwardens.
"A Guardian bunker," she whispered, a glint of disbelief in her eyes. "I thought they were all lost."
"My father... wasn't a Guardian," Elian whispered, troubled. "He was a scavenger. He found this place. He said it held a truth."
The wheel gave way with a metallic scream, releasing a hiss of compressed air. The ladder descending into the bowels of the earth exhaled a smell of sterile cold and chemicals, the perfume of a bygone world.
Liora's greenish light illuminated their descent into a cylinder of metal and dead cables. Black screens, silent instruments—a sanctuary of defunct science. But at the back, a hand-painted map on preserved canvas told the story of the Blighted Lands. And it was covered in frantic annotations.
Liora approached it, her fingers almost touching the words. "By the Springs... they were studying the Blight. Not just its advance. Its essence."
Kael's gaze was drawn to a sealed jar on a console. Inside, a fragment of black, porous, vaguely organic matter pulsed with a malevolent glow. His shadows recoiled, disgusted. It was a part of him, captured, analyzed.
Kael (narration): "They had gutted me and framed my cancer. I felt naked, violated."
" 'The Blight is not a disease. It is a consciousness. A hungry, fragmented will that diverts life,' " read Liora, her voice altered. " 'We have isolated a sample. Designation: Shadow-Borne Pathogen.' They knew, Kael. They knew what you carry."
Elian, meanwhile, had opened a chest and pulled out more recent maps, his father's work. But his fingers found a tarnished silver locket. "This was my mother's... He never parted with it." He opened it. The portrait of a woman with a kind gaze. And behind it, carefully folded, a meticulously detailed sketch.
Kael's face, younger, long before the shadows became demanding masters.
Kael (narration): "Time tore apart. That man, on that paper, was a ghost. The one I was before becoming a scourge."
Kael snatched the locket, his hand betraying a tremor he couldn't contain. "How?" The raspy question growled in the silence.
"I don't know!" Elian defended, stepping back. "He just said the Shadow-Bearer would return. That you were the key."
Liora placed a hand on Kael's arm, a bridge between his present and his screaming past. "Kael... who was he?"
The name emerged from the limbo of his memory, heavy with consequence.
"Alaric," Kael let fall, the name sounding like a death knell. "His name was Alaric. A bio-engineer. At the Sunfall Citadel. He was part... of the project. The one that created me."
The revelation hit them full force. Elian, the scientist's son. Kael, the test subject. The bunker wasn't a refuge. It was a laboratory, and they the last specimens.
Kael (narration): "I wasn't a man remembering his past. I was a prototype returning to its point of origin. And this child... my keeper, my prison."
Suddenly, a dull, metallic THUD shook the ceiling, raining fine dust. Then another. Something heavy and deadly had landed on the surface.
Liora extinguished her light. "The Purifiers," she murmured, and this time, her voice carried a new, cold fear. "They don't walk to their prey. They fall from the sky like judgment."
Above them, the rhythmic sound of armored boots began to encircle the watchtower. They were trapped.
Kael looked at the locket, then at the boy, his involuntary keeper. He crumpled the drawing in his fist. The anger was an acid, but an acid that could serve as fuel.
Kael (narration): "Alaric had made his son bait. A final move in a dirty war. Fine. I'll play by these rules."
The shadows rose, not as a disordered storm, but as sharpened blades, ready to strike. His gaze met Liora's in the dark, and he knew she understood.
"We're not hiding anymore," Kael said, his voice now just a threatening thread. "They want to purge the past? Let them come and get it."
The footsteps stopped above the hatch. A voice, distorted by a loudspeaker and laden with fanatical conviction, boomed.
"Kael Veyr. You are an anomaly. A stain. Surrender the abomination within you, and the healer and the child may merit a swift end."
Kael smiled, the grimace of a cornered predator.
"Come down," he threw back, his challenge echoing in the metal, "and come take it."