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A gate town to Carceri, a prison plane. The town is prisonlike in that it's easy to get it but harder to get back out. The town is surrounded by a huge wall of rusty metal woven through with razorvines. The air is acrid.

The wind, sighing off the vast, restless expanse of the Inland Sea, carried a fading tang of salt and distance, a memory already receding northward with every league the tireless hopper bore them south. Behind them, the hazy blue shimmer of the great freshwate...

Their entry into the recognized sovereign territory of D’alwah was marked by no fanfare, no welcoming committees, but by a subtle, yet palpable, shift in the atmosphere of the land itself. The untamed southern woodlands, though still vast and only thinly mappe...

The council of war, held in the flickering lantern light of the loyalist field camp, had been brief, decisive, weighted with the grim necessities of their desperate situation. Hiero, though accorded the deference due a prince-consort and the proven savior of t...

The silent detonation of psychic energy ripped through the ancient fortress, a shockwave felt not in the stone, but in the very fabric of consciousness. The great serpent guardian, its physical form thrashing in the now dimly lit throne room, its mental connec...

The journey eastward, back towards the precarious haven of the loyalist stronghold, was a passage through subtly altered landscapes, both external and internal. The heavy, psychic oppression that had thickened the air near Fuala’s fortress receded with each le...

The valley stronghold, nestled deep within the loyalist-held foothills, became a crucible in the weeks following Hiero’s return. The initial relief and reunion gave way swiftly to the harsh realities of their precarious position. They were an island of resista...

The retreat from the ravaged Unclean depot was a sodden, nerve-shredding counterpoint to the stealthy approach. Behind them, explosions still rumbled sporadically as timed charges Hiero had set detonated amongst the remaining supplies, adding to the chaotic sy...

The stalemate ground on, measured not in weeks but in the slow erosion of hope and the relentless accumulation of small, draining perils. The Southern Front, forged in the crucible of shared danger, held its precarious line along the foothills bordering the va...

The psychic scream of the violated Gaean dome echoed in their minds long after the physical structure vanished behind the first ridges of the desolate plain. They ran, five figures fleeing across a landscape poisoned by ancient radiation and the encroaching, a...

The brief, charged council in Abbot Demero’s austere chamber concluded as the first gray fingers of dawn probed the eastern sky over Sask City. The weight of the decisions made, the perils embraced, settled upon Hiero not as a crushing burden, but as a cold, c...

The mist lay cool and curtained over the lake, a vast, pearly shroud clinging to the dark water and blurring the edges of the world. It muffled sound, distorted distance, turning the familiar islands into half-glimpsed phantoms and the farther shores into mere...

The silent command to withdraw, born of horrifying discovery, galvanized the small reconnaissance party into immediate, desperate action. Behind them, the pulsating, gelatinous dome, the grotesque fungal garden, and the chilling tableau of enslaved, transforme...

The chamber was high and narrow, walled with unadorned, grey stone that seemed to absorb the light from the single, shielded lantern hanging from a soot-blackened chain overhead. It was Abbot Kulase Demero’s private council room, a place few outside the highes...

Days melted into a green-tinged, sweat-soaked monotony of silent movement and constant vigilance. Since leaving the relative bustle and perceived security of Namcush Fort, Hiero’s small, disparate company had plunged deep into the northern Taig, that vast, anc...

The Taig held its breath under the weight of the moonless dark. Deep within the forest canopy, where the colossal trees formed interlocking vaults far overhead, Hiero and his small, disparate company completed their final preparations. The air was cool, damp, ...

The pre-dawn hours found them miles deeper within the labyrinthine embrace of the Taig, having put as much distance as possible between themselves and the chaos they had sown in the Unclean encampment. They moved now not with the desperate haste of their initi...

The Taig, vast and indifferent, swallowed them whole. They moved through its shadowed depths not as conquerors, nor even as explorers, but as fugitives wrapped in a fragile, self-woven cloak of psychic silence. The forest floor, a deep carpet of millennia of f...