# Chapter 195: The Sunken City
The silence that followed the battle was heavier than any of the corpses littering the tower. It was a silence filled with the ghost of Soren's scream and the lingering, ozone tang of his unleashed power. Nyra watched him, his back ramrod straight as he stared out into the wastes, a statue carved from grief and terror. The vision had broken something in him, or perhaps it had revealed the crack that was already there. He was a vessel that had been filled to the brim with a poison he couldn't name.
"We need to move," Kestrel said, his voice a low rasp. He nudged a dead Chitter-Lurk with his boot, its multifaceted eyes staring blankly at the ashen sky. "The blood will draw scavengers. Things worse than these."
Grak grunted in agreement, already prying a serrated plate from one of the creatures. "Good carapace. Strong."
Soren didn't move. He just stood there, his knuckles white on the hilt of his sword. The Withering King. The name echoed in the hollows of his mind, a litany of despair. He had felt its hunger, a cold, patient void that wanted to unmake everything, to return the world to the silent, perfect ash from which it had been born. And he had felt a terrifying resonance, a flicker of recognition in the heart of his own Gift. Was his power just a lesser echo of that ultimate destruction?
"Soren." Nyra's voice was soft, but it cut through his internal storm. She stood beside him, not touching him this time, just sharing the space. "We can't stay here. The mission… the heart-stones."
The mission. The word was a lifeline, a flimsy rope thrown into the chasm of his despair. It was a reason to move, a reason to put one foot in front of the other when every instinct screamed to curl up and let the grey consume him. He took a breath, the air tasting of ash and death. "Lead on, Kestrel."
The guide gave a curt nod, his gaze lingering on Soren for a moment, a flicker of something like pity in his eyes before it was masked by professional pragmatism. They descended the tower, their footsteps echoing in the oppressive quiet. The bodies on the stairs were a grim reminder of how close they had come to an end. Piper, pale but resolute, kicked a severed claw out of her path.
Once back on the ground, Kestrel set a brutal pace, angling away from the tower and toward a series of low, jagged hills on the horizon. The landscape was a monotonous sea of grey, broken only by the skeletal remains of pre-Bloom structures that jutted from the ash like broken teeth. The sky was a perpetual, colourless dome, pressing down on them, amplifying their isolation. For hours, they walked in silence, the only sounds the crunch of their boots and the whisper of the wind scouring the plains.
Soren's mind was a battlefield. The vision replayed in fragments: the sky tearing open, the wave of silent, grey energy, the face of the Withering King—a visage not of rage, but of profound, cosmic sorrow. It was the sorrow of a dying star, the grief of a world ending. He felt a strange, terrifying empathy for it, a connection that made his stomach churn. Was this the fate of all Gifted? To be inexorably drawn to the source of their power's corruption?
As they crested the final hill, the landscape fell away into a breathtaking, horrifying vista. Before them lay a colossal crater, miles wide and impossibly deep, its sides a sheer, layered scar on the face of the earth. It was as if a god had punched a hole in the world. The crater was filled not with shadow, but with a sea of fine, shimmering ash that glowed with a faint, internal luminescence.
"By the Concord," Nyra breathed, her hand going to her mouth.
At the very bottom of the crater, nestled in the glowing ash like a jewel in a velvet box, was the city. Or what was left of it. Spires and domes, streets and plazas, all preserved in a state of eerie, silent ruin. It wasn't destroyed; it was sunken, swallowed whole by the Bloom. The architecture was alien, graceful and sweeping, unlike the blocky, functional structures of the Crownlands. It was a city from a forgotten age, a tomb waiting to be plundered.
"The Sunken City of Aeridor," Kestrel said, his voice filled with a mixture of awe and dread. "Or what's left of it. The legends say it was the heart of the world before the Bloom. The place where magic was born."
"The heart-stones," Grak rumbled, his eyes fixed on the ruins below. "They will be there."
"The descent is the problem," Kestrel continued, pointing to a series of narrow switchbacks carved into the crater wall. "The path is unstable. And the air… it gets thick the deeper you go. The magic here is old, and it doesn't like visitors."
Soren looked down into the crater, the vision of the Withering King still fresh in his mind. This place felt like a wound, a place where the world's skin had been peeled back to reveal the raw magic beneath. It was the last place on earth he wanted to go. But his family's face flashed in his mind—his mother's tired eyes, his brother's hopeful smile. The mission. It was the only thing that mattered. "We don't have a choice. Let's go."
The descent was treacherous. The path was little more than a goat track, crumbling under their feet with every step. The air grew warmer, thicker, tasting of static and ancient dust. It pressed in on them, making their lungs burn and their heads ache. Soren felt the latent magic humming against his skin, a dissonant chord that vibrated in his bones. His Cinder-Tattoos began to itch, a faint, restless heat spreading through his arm.
Nyra moved with a liquid grace, her senses on high alert. She felt the pressure too, a psychic weight that made the hairs on her arms stand up. "This place is… alive," she murmured. "Not in a good way."
Halfway down, they had to navigate a section where the path had collapsed entirely. A fifty-foot chasm yawned before them, the glowing ash swirling like a slow-moving river far below. "I can get across," Kestrel said, already uncoiling a grappling hook and line. "I'll anchor it."
He made the throw with practiced ease, the hook catching on a jagged outcrop on the far side. He tested the rope, then scampered across, his movements sure and confident. One by one, they followed, the rope swaying precariously over the drop. Soren went last, his body aching, his mind still reeling. As he reached the middle of the chasm, he glanced down into the glowing ash. For a moment, he thought he saw shapes moving within it, vast and slow, like leviathans in a deep, grey sea. He blinked, and they were gone. Shaken, he pulled himself the rest of the way across.
When they finally reached the crater floor, the silence was absolute. The glowing ash came up to their shins, soft and dry as powder. The city rose before them, its towers piercing the gloom, its streets empty and immaculate. There was no sign of decay, no dust, no rubble. It was as if the city had been frozen in time the instant it was swallowed. The air was still, but it thrummed with a low, resonant frequency that Soren felt in his teeth.
"Stay close," Kestrel warned, his hand on the hilt of his shortsword. "The legends say the city's guardians still walk its streets."
They moved into the city, their footsteps leaving deep prints in the ash. The buildings were made of a smooth, dark stone that seemed to drink the light. Strange, geometric patterns were carved into every surface, patterns that seemed to shift and writhe at the edge of their vision. The feeling of being watched was overwhelming, a palpable pressure from a thousand unseen eyes.
Grak stopped, pointing a thick finger at a nearby plaza. In its center stood a statue of a figure with too many arms and a face that was a smooth, featureless oval. But it wasn't the statue that had captured his attention. It was the ground around it. Poking through the ash were clusters of crystals, pulsing with a soft, violet light. They were beautiful, but the light they cast was cold and sterile.
"The heart-stones," Grak said, his voice a reverent whisper.
As they approached, the air grew even heavier. The crystals were the source of the resonant hum, a chorus of silent notes that vibrated through the soles of their boots. They were about the size of a man's fist, multifaceted and impossibly clear, with a core of pure, pulsating light. This was what Grak needed to forge the gear that could help mitigate the Cinder Cost.
Nyra knelt beside one of the clusters, her gloved hand hovering just above its surface. "The energy is incredible," she said. "It feels… pure. Untainted." She looked at Soren, her expression concerned. "How are you feeling?"
Soren didn't answer. He was staring at the crystals, and a cold dread was seeping into his veins. The light they emitted was the same colour as the energy he had seen in his vision, the same colour as the wave that had consumed the world. The Withering King's light. These weren't just inert minerals; they were fragments of the Bloom itself, nodes of the cataclysm's power. To touch them felt like reaching into a fire.
"We need to be careful," he finally said, his voice tight. "There's something wrong with them."
"They're just rocks, Soren," Kestrel said, already pulling a small pickaxe from his pack. "Valuable rocks. Let's get what we need and get out."
Grak agreed, hefting his warhammer. "I will break them."
As Grak raised his hammer, Soren's instincts screamed at him. "Wait!"
But it was too late. The hammer came down. The moment the metal struck the crystal, the world exploded not with sound, but with force. A wave of psychic energy blasted outwards, throwing them all off their feet. Soren hit the ground hard, the air driven from his lungs. The humming in the air intensified a thousandfold, becoming a deafening shriek inside their skulls.
And then, the ground began to shake.
It started as a tremor, a low shudder that ran through the city's foundations. Then it grew into a violent, bucking heave. The glowing ash around them erupted, geysers of grey powder shooting into the air. Cracks spiderwebbed across the plaza, the ground splitting open with a sound like tearing cloth.
"What's happening?!" Piper yelled, scrambling to get away from the widening cracks.
Kestrel was on his feet in an instant, his bow drawn, his eyes wide with terror. "Something heard us!"
Directly ahead of them, in the center of the plaza, the ground bulged upwards. Ash and stone were pushed aside as something colossal began to rise from beneath the city. A vast, segmented shape, glistening with a thousand violet crystals, broke the surface. It was a worm, a monster of impossible size, its body a living tunnel of earth and crystal. Its head, a nightmare of churning plates and a circular, razor-toothed maw, rose from the ash, towering over the ruined buildings. The crystals embedded in its hide pulsed in time with the ones on the ground, a single, malevolent heartbeat.
The creature let out a roar, a sound that was not heard with the ears but felt in the soul. It was a sound of grinding stone and shattering crystal, a vibration that threatened to tear them apart. The violet light from the crystals flared, bathing the plaza in an eerie, terrifying glow. It was the guardian of the Sunken City, and they had just woken it up.