Selena returned to Ashborne three weeks after her first visit, drawn by a disturbance she felt through the eternal flame—something wrong, something breaking in the fragile community she had witnessed being born. As she approached the settlement, she immediately sensed that something fundamental had changed.
The city had grown. Where before there had been fifty structures, now there were more than a hundred, the settlement sprawling outward across the ash dunes in patterns that suggested rapid, perhaps too rapid, expansion. More people had come, drawn by word of a place where stability was possible, where community could be built without hierarchy.
But with the growth had come something else. Something darker.
