Tess and her comrades teleported to their new location. The terrain beneath their boots wasn't soil but a skin of shifting plates, sometimes fleshy, sometimes stone. Black trees twisted in unnatural spirals, and the horizon folded on itself like paper soaked in oil.
Before them loomed a broken monument of ancient power—an alien-like skyscraper, impossibly tall and spiraling like a spine of fused ribs. Its surface was cracked, pitted, bleeding faint glows from long-dead veins. The air reeked of rust, salt, and something stranger—like memory left to rot.
At its peak, the Fragment hovered. A crystalline shard, slowly rotating in a pillar of fractured light. It pulsed, and the building beneath it shifted, almost breathing.
Lanse stared upward. "There's the fragment... it's waiting."
