Getting a one-armed, half-poisoned man through the Ironfall scrap district was like trying to sneak a lit torch through a gunpowder store. Every shadow seemed to hold an Imperial patrol. Every distant clang of metal made Liam flinch and stumble.
"This is impossible," Mara hissed, ducking behind a heap of shattered mana-batteries as the glow of a patrol's lantern swept the alley ahead. Liam leaned against the rusted metal, his breath a ragged whistle, face slick with sweat. The healing potion was a war inside him, fighting the wakeleaf and infection, and losing the battle for his stamina.
Damian watched the lantern light recede. The city was a clenched fist around them. The bounty poster's sketch of his mouth felt branded onto his skin. They needed a hole to crawl into that the Empire would never think to look.
"The Blightwood," Mara whispered, her eyes wide with an idea born of pure desperation. "Not the deep zones. The Fungus-Queen's Grove. It's cordoned off on the north edge. Even the Imperial clean-up crews won't go in there. They say it's… haunted. By the first Spore Nyx that ever formed."
"Can he make it?" Damian nodded at Liam.
Liam gritted his teeth, pushing himself off the metal. "Try and stop me," he gasped, a spark of his old grim humor flickering in his pain-glazed eyes.
They moved like ghosts through the industrial wasteland, reaching the city's northern palisade. The wall here was older, crumbling, and the section bordering the Blightwood was reinforced with warnings and rusting 'QUARANTINE' sigils. A section of the wall had sagged inward, roots of mutated, bulbous fungi pushing through the stone like grasping fingers.
They squeezed through the breach.
The air changed instantly. It was warmer, humid, and carried the same cloying sweet-rot stench, but fainter, older. The Fungus-Queen's Grove wasn't a forest of towering fungal spires like the deep wood. It was a graveyard of them. Giant, hollowed-out caps lay collapsed like rotten umbrellas. Bioluminescent moss cast a ghostly, greenish-blue light over a landscape of soft, spongy ground and crumbling, sponge-like "trees." The silence was absolute. No insect chirps, no animal calls. Just the occasional, wet plop of condensed moisture falling from a cap.
It was, in its own way, more terrifying than the active Blightwood. This was a place where the infestation had won, consumed everything, and then died of starvation.
They picked their way through the necrotic wonderland. Liam's condition worsened with every step. The eerie silence was broken only by his labored breathing and their muffled footsteps. After an hour, with Liam on the verge of collapse, Damian spotted it—a darker patch at the base of a giant, petrified fungal stump. A crevice, leading down.
"Cave," he said.
It wasn't a cave. It was a burrow, dug by something large. The entrance was slick with a clear, viscous slime that smelled of ammonia and decay.
"Home sweet home," Liam croaked, before his eyes rolled back and he passed out.
They dragged him inside. The tunnel sloped sharply downward, the walls transitioning from packed earth and fungus to smooth, worn stone. It was colder here, the air stale but free of spores. After thirty feet of descent, it opened into a small, round chamber. The source of the smooth walls became clear—the place was littered with old, gnawed bones. Beast bones, humanoid bones, all picked clean. This was a larder.
But it was empty now. And it was defensible.
Mara used the last of her controlled flame to light a piece of dry fungus they'd brought, creating a dim, sputtering light. Damian propped Liam against a wall and administered another half-dose of healing potion. The man was burning up with fever.
"He needs rest. Real rest. Or he'll die of shock," Mara said, her voice hollow with exhaustion.
As Liam drifted in and out of consciousness, mumbling about steel and wind, Damian kept watch at the tunnel entrance. The silence of the grove was oppressive. It felt less like emptiness and more like waiting.
In a moment of relative quiet, Liam's eyes flickered open. He was more lucid, the potions and the cold finally driving back the wakeleaf haze. He looked at Damian, his expression a complex knot of pain, gratitude, and lingering fear.
"Noah," Liam rasped suddenly.
Damian turned. "What about him?"
"Before they took him… he was cuffed, bleeding from the head. But his damn bird was still free, circling." Liam took a shuddering breath. "Korv landed on my shoulder for a second. Noah… he made eye contact. He said, clear as day, 'Tell the guy with the dark aura. The grey priest took the shard. The raven sees all.' Then they clubbed him and dragged him away."
Damian's blood, already cold, turned to ice slurry in his veins. "Grey priest? What shard?"
"The raven… it followed the chaos after your fight. Saw a man. Grey robes, not Imperial armor. Slipped into the Warrens like smoke. Went to the body of the female leader. The one you…" Liam trailed off, unable to say it. "He pried something from her hand. A piece of black crystal. Shiny, like obsidian. Then he vanished. Noah was obsessed. Kept saying 'the Vatican's cleaners are here.'"
A Shadow Vatican priest. On the scene, minutes after the fight. Not to engage Damian, not to help the Empire. To collect evidence. To retrieve a specific item from Elara's corpse. A black crystal shard.
What had she been holding? A communication device? A tracking beacon? Or something else?
The pieces clicked into a terrifying new configuration. The Vatican's interest wasn't just academic. They were actively monitoring the fallout of his actions, collecting the pieces. They were assembling a puzzle, and he was the centerpiece.
The dim fungus-light flickered.
A deep, resonant thrum vibrated through the stone beneath them. It was not a sound of the surface. It came from deep below. The bones in the larder chamber rattled softly.
Mara was on her feet in an instant, staff raised. "What was that?"
The thrum came again, stronger. A rhythmic pulse, like a slow, massive heartbeat. And with it, a new smell wafted up from the deeper part of the tunnel—a smell of rich, wet earth, ozone, and something profoundly ancient.
The burrow they were in wasn't just a den.
It was an entryway.
And something was waking up in the deep dark below.