Ash and MemoryThe wind carried ash like snow.It drifted in slow spirals across the ruined borderlands, soft as silk and thick with the scent of scorched iron. Once, this had been farmland. Green fields, scattered homesteads, the gentle hum of machines harvesting wheat and sunvines. Now only black earth remained, cracked and poisoned. Whatever grew here now was not meant to be touched.Dren Asher rose from the ash.He didn’t remember falling. One moment, there was silence true silence, the kind that pressed into your bones and the next, he was pulling himself out of a crater with blood in his mouth and static ringing in his ears.His armor was half-burned, scorched through the left shoulder. The plating along his ribs was warped. Every breath hurt. But the worst part the truly wrong part was the crown fused to the side of his skull.He felt its weight before he saw it. Not just a metal band. No, this thing had roots dark, glimmering veins like fossilized blood, burrowing just beneath

The One That WatchesThe wind over the northern range was sharper now.Dren stood at the ridge’s edge, overlooking the ruins of the Old Bastion the original fortress-city that once protected the spine of the continent. Now it lay broken, gutted by time and flame, its shattered walls half-swallowed by the creeping ash.It was quiet here.Too quiet.Not even the echoes dared linger.Veyna adjusted her rebreather mask behind him. “You’re sure it’s here?”“I felt it,” Dren said, eyes locked on the jagged silhouette below. “The breach will open in the heart of the ruins. Same place I trained before the war. Same place I died.”“That version of you,” she corrected. “Not you.”“Does it matter?” he asked.Veyna didn’t answer.They moved together, boots crunching through black grit and broken relics. The descent into the ruins was slow, and Dren’s thoughts were even slower.He remembered pieces now snapshots of another life. Of many other lives. Flashing blades, blood on marble floors, screami

City of MasksThe ash wind howled behind them as Dren and Veyna approached the fractured city of Korr Vale a place where memory didn’t just linger in shadows, it screamed.Korr Vale rose like a jagged wound in the landscape. Once a technological marvel, now a twisted echo of itself. Buildings tilted at impossible angles, held aloft by gravitational tethers that pulsed blue in the twilight. Antennae flickered with static atop rusted towers, scanning for intrusions both human and… otherwise.The city wore a mask, same as its people.And beneath that mask?Nothing but madness.Dren tugged his scarf higher over his mouth, eyes narrowing. “So this is where he’s nesting.”Veyna nodded without looking at him. “If the rumors are true, he’s made a palace of ghosts. And he’s not hiding anymore. He’s building.”The wind carried their steps down the sloped road that led to the gate. Above it, mechanical sentinels watched with red glass eyes. Their limbs twitched, half-mechanical, half-organic—re

Ash in the VeinsThe Bleeding Wilds began where the light stopped making sense.What should have been a forest twisted trees with ash-colored bark, clawing branches, and gnarled roots was instead a surreal nightmare of flickering shadows and fractured memory. The air buzzed with static, and the ground beneath Dren’s boots pulsed faintly with residual heat from old, forgotten wars. Every step forward felt like walking through a memory that wasn’t his.And somewhere ahead lay the Breach.Dren tightened his grip on the Pulse Emitter. The device felt heavier than it should have—like it had grown sentient weight. Behind him, Veyna moved without a word, her cloak trailing behind her like a shadow refusing to let go.“Smell that?” she muttered.Dren nodded. “Ash.”“No,” she said. “Blood. And time.”They reached a clearing where the trees bent away from a black obelisk sunk halfway into the earth. Its surface shimmered, reflecting not the present, but broken flickers of the past: children run