Location:Lower Realm — Western frontier territories
Date/Time:Mid Sparkfall, 9939 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm
The dawn ritual had become a kind of prayer.
Xingteng stood at the edge of a ridge that overlooked nothing — scrubland and dry grass and the bones of hills too old to remember their own names. Eyes closed. Hands open at her sides. Reaching with senses that had been carved open by trauma and refined by months of desperate, fruitless searching.
Where are you?
She pushed her awareness outward, past the thin essence of the Lower Realm's frontier, past the whisper of wind through stunted trees, past the faint signatures of creatures that had never seen a dragon and never would. Searching for silver. For the warmth she'd felt in that abandoned cave sanctuary — laughter remembered in stone, safety woven into walls by hands she'd never held.
Nothing answered. The world remained stubbornly, impossibly empty.
