The crystal forest sang, and the song was wrong.
Daggeroth had grown up with the sounds of the jungle: the calls of predators, the rustle of prey, the endless symphony of life and death. This was different. This was a song without a singer, a vibration without a source, a noise that crawled into the skull and nested there.
They moved carefully, staying close, every sense screaming danger. Koronos led, the Sword of Otepi in his hand, its light a pale comfort in the sickly glow. Corvannafax walked at his flank, her crystal blade ready. And Daggeroth listened.
The song shifted.
Without warning, the undergrowth exploded.
A creature erupted from the crystalline foliage: a thing of black metal and pulsing green light, its body angular and wrong, its movements jerky but impossibly fast. It was not alive. Not in any way Daggeroth understood. It had no eyes, only green glowing sockets. No mouth, only a hinge of metal that opened and closed as if tasting the air.
It ignored Daggeroth completely.
It lunged at Koronos.
Corvannafax met it mid-charge, her crystal blade slashing across its metal hide. Sparks flew. The creature barely slowed. It swung a limb like a blade, and Koronos ducked, rolling, coming up with the Sword of Otepi blazing. He struck true, cleaving through its torso, and the thing collapsed, green light sputtering like a dying flame.
Even as it fell, its empty sockets fixed on Koronos until the last moment.
The group stood still, breathing hard, listening for more. The forest sang on, indifferent.
Daggeroth poked at the metal, at the fading green light, at the joints that should not move the way they did. Then he looked up.
"It wasn't hunting randomly," he said. "It came straight for you, Koronos." He looked at the Sword, then at Corvannafax's blade. "It didn't even look at me. It looked at your sword, Corvannafax. Perhaps it's drawn to majik? Majik is a threat here, more than anywhere else."
Corvannafax's grip tightened on her weapon. "Metal beasts be damned. I'm not casting my sword away."
They moved on, but slower now, more careful. And Koronos began to struggle.
The ambient magic of Hadron pressed against him like a physical weight. Through the Bond, the connection that had always linked him to Shelove, to animals, to the wild things of the world, he began to hear everything.
Corvannafax's isolation washed over him like cold water. The endless, gnawing knowledge that she would never belong anywhere, not among Reds, not among Blues, not among humans. The cosmos was her home, and that meant she would always be a stranger in it. And yet, her thoughts kept going back to Emberhold, the place of her people. Not the place of her birth, but the place of the Red Malataks.
Daggeroth's mind was a wall of desperate focus, a young hunter using every skill he had to keep them alive.
It was too much. Too loud. A constant assault on senses never meant to receive this input.
And then his power went haywire.
The winged flight he had manifested on Sleeping Dragon, barely controlled at the best of times, exploded outward. He flickered: present one moment, gone the next, translocating randomly in short bursts. He appeared three paces left, then behind them, then nearly fell into a crystal formation that would have sliced him to ribbons.
"Daggeroth, stop!" he heard someone shout, but the voice was distant, swallowed by the noise of the local reality around him.
He flickered again. Again. Again.
No.
Through sheer will, he forced it down. Locked it away. Buried the power so deep it could not easily escape. The effort showed on his face, in the tremor of his hands, in the beads of sweat on his blue skin. Even still, he would shimmer from time to time. He was a beacon in this place, and every moment here cost him.
But he was still standing. Still moving. Still here.
For now.
Daggeroth watched Koronos struggle, and something shifted in his chest.
For the first time in the entire time he's been with the group, since the Bleak Pass, since the deep cold had taken root, since the old woman in Oceanus had named it: Daggeroth was not the weakest link.
He was the only one who could move freely. Corvannafax could, if she would put the majikal sword down, but she won't.
The metal stalkers could not sense him. The ambient magic did not press against him. The song of the crystal forest, maddening to Koronos, was just noise to his ears. He was invisible in a realm of blinding magical light.
He took point.
Every skill his father taught him came flooding back. Every instinct honed in the Samiran jungle, every lesson learned in the dark places of the world. He read the crystal forest: the patterns of the singing, the subtle shifts in light, the distant sounds of metal bodies moving through the undergrowth.
That was the blessing. The stalkers were not stealthy. Their metal joints scraped. Their movements were jerky, mechanical, loud. Once you knew what to listen for, you could hear them coming from half a league away. Although Shelove could hear everything first, and usually warned Koronos before Daggeroth could, now that she knows what to listen for as well.
He guided them.
"Stop," he whispered, and Koronos froze. A stalker passed by in the distance, trying to zero in on their location, but it can't because they keep moving. "Left," he said, and Corvannafax adjusted, leashing her warrior's instinct to fight.
It was the first time he had ever been essential in this way. The first time his lack of magic was not a weakness but a weapon. The weight of it settled on his young shoulders, heavy and strange.
He did not complain.
After hours of careful navigation, Daggeroth spotted it. A structure half-buried in crystalline growth. Ancient stone, broken columns, the remnants of what had once been a holy site or perhaps an outpost. No singing plants grew within its perimeter. No metal stalkers patrolled nearby.
Shelter.
They slipped inside, and for the first time since arriving on Hadron, the pressure eased. The song of the crystal forest faded to a distant hum. The air, still wrong, was at least still.
And there, carved into a wall that had survived millennia, were words in the oldest of Old Tongues. Ancient, worn, but legible. A warning, left by those who came before:
"To any who still live, flee this place. Hadron is no longer a prison. It is becoming something else. He is converting it, stone by stone, crystal by crystal, into his domain. The walls remember. The stones listen. Stay away. Stay alive."
The group stood in silence, absorbing the meaning.
Supremus hadn't just been sitting in his cage for ten thousand years. He'd been building. Transforming the very fabric of the prison into an extension of himself. The metal stalkers were not guards to keep him in: they were guards to keep others out. Pieces of his will given form. The entire planetoid was becoming a fortress, a war machine, a god's body.
Corvannafax broke the silence first. "Then we end him before he finishes."
Koronos looks at her sideways, says nothing, but the silence says it all: I don't know if we can. Then he shook his head slowly. "If he's been building for ten thousand years, he's already finished. We're walking into something he's been preparing for since before our ancestors were born."
Koronos said nothing. He stood apart, gripping the Sword of Otepi, his face giving nothing away. He was feeling the weight of what lay ahead. They all were.
Daggeroth turned away from the inscription, back to the entrance. Back to the singing dark.
Night was falling on Hadron. Not true night: there was no true night here, not in the way he understood it. Just a deepening of the sickly colors, a dimming of the distant light. The sun, such as it was, had been blocked by Sleeping Dragon as Terra Primius set somewhere beyond the veil. Even when the sun was up, it looked different here, because they were not in real space. They were in a pocket dimension, a cage designed to keep the Spires from tearing themselves apart with gravitational forces.
And the crystal forest sang on. Louder now, as if aware of their presence. As if waiting.
Daggeroth stood guard at the ruin's entrance, bow in hand, eyes scanning the darkness. Behind him, his companions rested, gathered strength, prepared for what came next. He thought about the old woman in Oceanus. The net-mender who had looked at him with ancient eyes and spoken of a deep cold. A cold not of her sea. Maybe this was what she meant. He thinks to himself, 'they called me the weak one. The child. The one who needed protecting… Okay, maybe no one actually said that, but that's how it feels sometimes.'
A stalker moved in the distance, its metal joints scraping against crystal. It passed without seeing him.
But out there, in the singing dark, I am the only one they cannot see. The only one the monsters ignore.
The song pulsed. The darkness deepened. He did not flinch.
Maybe that's what the old woman meant. The deep cold. The thing that makes me invisible. Maybe it was never a curse at all.