Halfway across.
The island was properly visible now — dark rock faces rising from the water, the mist sitting heavy and unmoving across its upper half like a permanent weather system that had long since given up pretending to be temporary.
The ocean had quieted further. Which should have been reassuring.
It wasn't.
"It's very still," Erica said.
Her tone had shifted slightly. Not serious yet. But approaching it from a distance.
"Yes," Jericho said.
"Is that good or bad?"
A pause.
"Undecided," he said.
William uncrossed and recrossed his arms.
"Wonderful," he said.
"We're close enough now that if something was going to react to our presence—" Alice started.
"Alice," William said.
"—it would likely have already—"
"Alice."
"—done so," she finished. "Which is a good sign."
William looked at her.
"Was that you trying?" he asked.
Alice thought about it.
"Somewhat," she admitted.
Despite everything William almost smiled.
Almost.
⸻
The island's shoreline became visible through the mist twenty minutes later.
Dark rock. Dense forest beyond it climbing the mountain faces. The kind of silence that wasn't empty but occupied — full of something that had decided, for the moment, not to announce itself.
Jericho slowed the vessel gradually.
Everyone felt it.
The banter stopped without anyone deciding to stop it.
The mood shifted — not into fear, just into the particular focus that settled over people who knew what they were doing and understood that what came next required all of it.
William uncrossed his arms and straightened.
Erica's hand moved to Satur's hilt. Not drawing it. Just finding it.
Alice's fingers wrapped around her sword.
Drako's eyes sharpened — the change in him immediate and complete, the easy stillness of the crossing replaced with something that said clearly and without announcement that this was what he actually was.
Jericho guided the vessel toward the shoreline.
The mist closed around them.
The island received them in silence.
For now.
⸻
(The Island of Fiery Mountains — Mist: Former Territory of Terys)
The vessel touched the shoreline without sound.
Jericho stilled the mercury beneath them and the forward motion died — the vessel settling against dark rock with the gentleness of something that had been guided rather than arrived. The mist closed around them immediately.
Not dramatically. Just present — thick and low, the kind that didn't move with the wind because it had long since decided the wind was irrelevant here.
They sat still for a moment.
Nobody moved first.
Then Jericho stepped out.
His boots met black rock.
The ground was solid. Stable. But there was a quality to it beneath his feet — a faint residual heat that had no business still being there twenty years after the fact, as though the earth had absorbed the Black Day so deeply that it had simply become part of what this island was now.
He looked around.
The others disembarked behind him one by one.
⸻
The first thing was the silence.
Not peaceful silence. Not the silence of a place undisturbed. Something more specific — the silence of a place that had been completely and thoroughly emptied of everything that had once filled it, and had never been refilled.
The shoreline stretched in both directions — black rock and dark sand, scorched smooth, carrying none of the usual evidence of a coastline. No shells. No driftwood. No marks of tide and time. Just burnt stone going in both directions until the mist swallowed it.
Beyond the shoreline the land rose gradually.
What should have been forest was ruins of forest — the skeletal remains of trees that had burned so completely and so long ago that they had calcified into permanent black shapes, frozen mid collapse, some still standing through pure structural stubbornness, most reduced to low dark formations that rose from the ground like broken teeth.
Between them the earth was cracked. Fine lines running through the blackened soil in patterns that suggested the ground had contracted from heat and never fully recovered. And from those cracks — faint. Very faint. But present.
Heat.
Still bleeding upward after two decades.
Erica crouched and held her hand close to one of the larger cracks without touching it.
"Still warm," she said quietly.
"The Athanatos Flame," Drako said. He was standing slightly apart from the group, eyes moving across the landscape with the careful attention of someone who had grown up hearing about this place and was now recalibrating everything they thought they knew about it. "Black fire that doesn't extinguish. Even after twenty years—"
"It's still in the ground," William finished.
"In the ground. In the air." Drako's eyes moved upward briefly. "In everything."
William looked at him.
"In the air," he repeated.
"Yes."
William looked at the mist around them with new consideration.
"Alice," he said carefully.
"I know," she said. She had already drawn a slow deliberate breath and was reading it the way someone reads something written in a language they partially understood.
Her expression was focused. Slightly concerned. "The air is compromised. Not immediately dangerous for us — our soul energy provides a degree of natural resistance." She paused. "For an ordinary person though—"
"They'd deteriorate," Jericho said.
"Quickly," Alice confirmed. "Days at most. Possibly less depending on exposure."
William absorbed this.
"So this is why," he said.
"Why what?" Erica asked, straightening from the crack.
"Why no one came back." He looked at the ruined landscape around them. "Not just the dragon. The island itself is inhospitable. Even if she wasn't here — even if she had never existed — this place would kill ordinary people just by being what it is."
The group stood with that for a moment.
The mist moved faintly around them. Not with the wind. Just with itself.
"No nation could have rebuilt here," Alice said softly. "Even if they wanted to. Even if they tried."
"Terys is truly gone," Erica said.
Not sadly. Not coldly. Just accurately — the way someone states a fact that has been true for a long time and simply needed saying out loud in the right place.
The right place being here.
On the ground that used to be the Island nation of Terys.
⸻
They moved inland slightly — away from the shoreline, further into the calcified forest — and the landscape deepened around them.
The ruins became more present.
Not just trees. Structure. The suggestion of walls in certain rock formations that were too regular to be natural.
The ghost of a road beneath the cracked earth — smooth stone underneath the layer of burnt soil, visible where the ground had split wide enough to reveal it.
Erica stopped beside one of the larger wall remnants.
She ran her hand along it slowly.
Stone that had been cut and placed by human hands. Worn smooth before the fire came. The fire had blackened it but hadn't taken the shape away entirely.
Someone had built this.
Someone had lived here.
She took her hand back.
Said nothing.
Jericho walked past a formation that might once have been a doorway — two vertical stones and a horizontal one, still standing through some combination of construction quality and luck, framing nothing now except more ruin beyond it.
He looked through it briefly.
Kept walking.
William said nothing through all of this.
Which was its own kind of statement.
⸻
They found a clearing twenty minutes inland.
Wider than the surroundings. The calcified trees thinning enough that the sky was visible above — grey and heavy, the mist not quite reaching down to ground level here, giving the space a slightly different quality from everything around it.
The ground was still cracked and dark but more stable underfoot, the heat less present.
Jericho stopped.
Looked around.
"Here," he said.
Nobody argued.
They began setting up camp with the efficiency of people who had done it enough times that the process required no discussion — bedrolls, supplies, the small contained fire that Erica produced with Satur, keeping the flame deliberately low and controlled, aware that fire on this island carried implications that fire elsewhere didn't.
The light it threw was warm against the dark landscape around them.
It helped.
Marginally.
William sat down heavily and looked at the sky.
"so, the Luxton Star," William said. "How do we find it."
"It's a fragment of a dead star," Jericho said. "One that crashed into this earth an incomprehensibly long time ago. Long before Terys. Long before the dragon claimed this island." He looked toward the mountains rising into the mist above them.
"The impact site is somewhere in the peak formations — the star fragment will still be embedded in the rock where it landed. Undisturbed. Something that old and that dense doesn't move unless something extraordinary forces it to."
"How do we identify it?" Alice asked.
"It'll be unlike anything else on this island," Jericho said. "The rock around it will be different — older, compressed differently from the impact. And the fragment itself—" He paused. "You'll feel it before you see it. Something that predates soul energy entirely has its own presence."
"And that's what makes it perfect for the weapons," Alice said, following the logic. "It doesn't react to soul energy because it existed long before soul energy existed."
"It doesn't yield to it," Jericho confirmed. "Which means a weapon forged from it won't break under the pressure of ability casting."
"How much do we need?" Erica asked.
"A piece the size of a fist would be sufficient for all five weapons," Jericho said. "The material is extraordinarily dense. A small amount goes a long way."
Alice nodded, already thinking through the logistics.
"We rest tonight," Jericho continued. "Search the peaks tomorrow at first light. The mist will be thinner in the morning — better visibility for reading the rock faces."
Reasonable. Practical.
William looked at the ruins around their camp.
At the ghost walls and the dead trees and the ground that still bled heat from a fire that had burned twenty years ago.
"Right," he said. "Rest. In the ruins of a nation destroyed by a dragon that is theoretically still on this island somewhere." He looked at the fire. "Perfectly normal evening."
"You complain a lot," Drako said.
William's eyes moved to him slowly.
It was the first time Drako had addressed him directly since the crossing.
"I have legitimate concerns," William said.
"You do," Drako said. "You still complain a lot."
A silence.
"I voice my concerns," William said. "There's a difference."
"Is there."
"Yes."
Drako looked at the fire.
Said nothing further.
William looked at the fire too.
Said nothing further either.
Erica watched this exchange with the quiet satisfaction of someone watching something they had been waiting for finally arrive.
Alice glanced at Jericho.
Jericho was looking at the mist beyond the clearing's edge.
His expression was the one he wore when he was listening to something the others couldn't hear — focused inward, reading something in the air or the ground or the particular quality of the silence around them.
Alice watched him for a moment.
Then looked at the fire.
The tips of her ears were slightly pink again.
Erica noticed.
Stored it away.
⸻
The camp settled into quiet.
The fire burned low.
The mist moved around the clearing's edge without entering it — as though even the atmosphere of this island observed certain boundaries.
Jericho remained looking at the mist for a long time after the others had begun to rest.
There was something in it.
Not threatening. Not approaching.
Just present.
An awareness that predated everything around it — older than the ruins, older than the Black Day, older than the name the world had given it in fear and grief and the desperate need to blame something for what had happened here.
Something that knew they were on the island.
And had not yet decided what to do about that.
Jericho looked at it for a long moment.
Then he turned back to the fire.
Tomorrow they would search for the Luxton Star.
Whatever else this island held —
Could wait until it decided not to.