The ruins of Warden's Wake disappeared behind Nyxia like smoke trailing from an old wound.
She didn't look back.
The mountain air thinned as she descended, the trees growing sparse, then sharp, as if resisting her passage. Pines replaced moonwillow. Moss turned to dry, spongy lichen. Loque'nahak padded beside her, but even his steps were uneven. His spectral fur rippled with imbalance, a flicker of light disrupted by something deeper than injury.
He stopped at the first sign of stone carved with forbidden glyphs.
The path ahead was more sensation than trail—a gut-sick pull humming beneath the earth. Arcane mist curled between broken stones, and the trees began to lean away from the direction Nyxia walked.
Loque growled, low and uncertain.
"I know," she whispered. "I feel it too."
She knelt beside him, one hand brushing down his shoulder. He leaned into it. The ground was sour with magic. Wrong. The kind that bit into spirit and bone. Whatever cloaked Thros'len didn't welcome Loque.
And it didn't want her, either.
She pressed her forehead against his, whispering a binding rune. Her tattoos shimmered in response, lighting the air with pale silver before dimming into silence.
"Wait for me," she said. "I'll come back."
He licked her hand once, then turned without protest, disappearing into the fog-laced trees like a fading breath.
The road turned sideways after that.
Literally.
Nyxia walked across old stones now tilted at impossible angles, ruins warped from the ground like roots pulling free from flesh. She passed statues that wept sap. Shattered altars covered in coins and bone tokens. Birds stopped chirping somewhere behind her. The wind carried laughter that had no speaker.
Then she found the door.
It lay carved into the wall of a cliff, veiled behind strands of vine and illusion. You didn't see it until you were already touching it. Runes spiraled around the frame like bramble-thorns, pulsing in sickly violet.
A warning.
A welcome.
Nyxia stepped through.
Thros'len was not a city.
It was a scar.
The passage dropped her into a circular cavern lined with glowmoss and old rope bridges, connecting platforms made from sunken ships and gutted towers. Everything had been stolen or salvaged. Moonstone chunks were welded with ogre iron. Canals glimmered with alchemical runoff, pulsing faintly like veins. The air smelled of fermented spice, unwashed skin, and hot metal.
Someone shoved past her. A goblin in a stitched coat cursed without looking.
Above her, suspended walkways creaked as armored hooves clattered across. She caught the flash of a draenei tail, braided in gold. A gang of vulpera children chased a floating ember-beetle through the shadows, laughing as one fell into a barrel of pickled meat.
The whole place moved like it was alive. Twitching. Watching.
She walked deeper.
"First time here?" a voice called.
Nyxia turned.
A vendor hunched over a table covered in teeth and jewelry grinned at her. His eyes were too round for his thin face—human, maybe, once. He held up a necklace made of polished claws and gristle.
"Good price for a moonkin bone chain," he said. "Very lucky. Keeps your dreams clean."
"I don't sleep," Nyxia said, continuing on.
He laughed after her. "Then you'll fit right in!"
She passed a pair of dwarves arguing in front of a shop that sold cursed mirrors and soul-bargaining parchments.
"Ye can't use that on a banshee, you daft bastard!" one barked, gesturing wildly at a rune-chalk diagram.
"Aye, and what do you know about spectral recursion, eh?" the other fired back. "That scroll's certified by a nether-priest in Silvermoon!"
Nyxia moved between them without a word.
The dwarves didn't even flinch.
Farther down, a sign caught her eye:
BOUNTY BOARD – Verified Dead Preferred
She skimmed the parchment postings:
A dracthyr wanted for murder.
A spirit beast reportedly haunting the northern chasm.
A name: Boo. Last seen in the eastern quarter. Armed. Flirtatious. "Do not trust her."
Nyxia pulled the paper free and tucked it into her belt.
The eastern quarter of Thros'len was quieter.
Not safer—just less theatrical. No fire-breathers or laughing gamblers. Here, the light dimmed to an almost tender gloom. Signs were written in six languages, some with claw marks. Stone buildings leaned into each other like old friends trying not to collapse.
Nyxia walked beneath laundry lines hung with silk robes stained from blood rituals. The ground grew sticky with arcane residue. She passed a towering kaldorei with black bark growing from his arms, kneeling beside a rusted basin filled with wine and teeth.
He didn't look up, but muttered softly, "They'll come for you too, little moon. They always come for the ones who don't die easy."
She kept walking.
The bounty notice crinkled at her side.
BOO. No surname. No clan. Just the one word, scrawled in charcoal like a dare. The description was precise but colorful:
"Silver-haired temptress. Smile like sin. Two sabers. One pistol. Ass for days. Not to be trusted. Do not follow her into shadowed places unless you've made peace with your gods—or you like your ribs inside out."
Below it, a smudged sketch. Stylized. Slightly romanticized. But the eyes in the drawing were sharp. Dangerous. Curious.
Nyxia didn't know why the Veil pulled her toward Boo.
Only that it did.
She stepped into the first bar she found with a red cloth tied over the doorframe. A sign carved into bone read: THE BROKEN TOOTH.
Inside, the scent of spicewine and lamp oil clung to everything. A handful of patrons nursed drinks in silence. One played a mournful melody on a stringed instrument shaped like a ribcage. Another stared at a wall, eyes flickering with someone else's memory.
A stout tauren with tattoos across her horns stood behind the bar, polishing a copper tankard with a dirty rag. Her nose twitched as Nyxia entered.
"New face," the barkeep said. "Don't smell like rot yet. You'll change."
"I'm looking for someone."
"You're not the first."
Nyxia pulled the bounty notice free and slid it across the bar.
The tauren barkeep didn't pick it up. Just grunted.
"Boo."
Nyxia nodded.
"She's been here."
"Of course she has. She's been everywhere. She's like mold with better cheekbones."
That pulled a breath from Nyxia. Almost a laugh.
The tauren leaned in, voice low.
"She left a few hours ago. Stirred up trouble. Turned a smuggler inside out, if you believe the story. Slipped out before the coins even hit the floor."
"Where'd she go?"
The tauren turned her head toward a man slouched at the end of the bar—hooded, human, sipping something that smoked faintly purple.
"Ask Nimek," she said. "He was there."
Nyxia approached.
The man didn't look up.
"Looking for the silver storm?" he muttered.
"If you mean Boo," Nyxia said, "yes."
He laughed, once, but it was dry and tired.
"She cut a man in half with a single stroke. Said he broke her wine glass. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. She didn't wait for his defense."
Nyxia tilted her head. "You were drinking with her?"
"I was hoping to." He finally looked up. His eyes were glassy. Not drunk—just tired in that way only grief or guilt could carve. "She dances around people like she's never really touching the ground. She talks in riddles. And she always leaves before the good part ends."
"Where did she go?"
He shrugged.
"Somewhere with a rooftop. Said she liked the wind tonight. Said she was waiting for someone who wouldn't know they were supposed to find her until they did."
That made Nyxia pause.
The man watched her for a beat, then added, "She also said the person would probably be tall, broody, and smell like forest ash. Said it'd be funny."
Nyxia's brows furrowed.
He smirked. "Looks like you're the punchline."
Outside again, the cavern air tasted of ozone.
A soft breeze wound down from the higher levels of the city—rare, artificial, pulled in through carved vents in the mountain above. Nyxia looked upward. Thros'len wasn't just a pit. It climbed.
And Boo, apparently, liked the view.
She moved quickly now, climbing the terraced steps between districts. Stone bridges arced over steam vents. A dwarven couple argued over the price of Void Ink near a mural painted in dragonbone dust. A group of kaldorei teens crouched in an alleyway, casting runes on animal bones, whispering for one of them to bleed for prophecy.
None of it slowed her.
Because higher up, perched just past a broken parapet where the ceiling cracked open to the sky—
Was a flicker of silver hair in the wind.