The climb ended in light, but not the light of freedom.
They hauled themselves up through the last narrow crack, leaving behind the suffocating darkness of the cavern. For a moment, the cold air above felt like a release, but what waited for them was not relief.
Spread out before their eyes lay the Fork, and it looked nothing like the place they had once known. The land stretched wide like a battlefield long ago destroyed, scarred and broken, left to rot with no one to tend to it.
Towers and shapes that had once stood tall were now crooked and bent, as if the world itself had collapsed under its own weight.
The ground was torn open in great wounds, glowing faintly from within, and rivers of pale fire slid slowly through the cracks, eating away at whatever they touched.
The Fork was no longer alive. It was a body broken and abandoned, and all they could do was stand and stare at its ruin.
