Crossing the scar was like being shoved through the eye of a storm. The world twisted around them—color draining, light warping, sound collapsing into a deep, pressure-filled silence. Then, it snapped.
They stumbled into a stillness so complete it felt unnatural.
The sky above was a bruised gray, heavy and low, casting a lifeless pallor across the land. There was no sun, only a sullen light that bled across the plain like dawn held perpetually in abeyance. The air hung thick, stagnant. It tasted faintly of metal and ash.
Beneath their boots, the ground was blackened earth—dry, cracked, and long-dead. Not a blade of grass remained. No insects. No birdsong. Not even the whisper of wind.
The land was dead.
Torren crouched low, running his fingers through the brittle dirt. "Nothing's grown here in years."
Koda nodded grimly, his eyes scanning the endless plain. "It's as if they ate it. All of it."
In every direction, the land stretched barren—rolling hills of soot-stained emptiness interrupted only by the occasional jagged stump of petrified trees, their roots twisted in agony like they'd died screaming.
It was a world that had been devoured, consumed not just of life, but of memory.
The scouts moved ahead, silent shadows against the bleak backdrop. Koda and the others followed, keeping formation, their weapons ready. They traveled for over an hour before they crested a ridge and saw it.
A city.
It spread out before them like a cyst on the land, built from what remained of the world it stood upon.
The buildings were crude shelters of warped, deadwood, lashed together with sinew and rusted metal. Many leaned precariously, warped by time and neglect, but each was shaped deliberately—windows cut, chimneys rising. These were not mindless huts.
There was purpose here. Function.
"They… built this," Dara murmured. "They planned. Worked together."
The perimeter was enclosed by walls of stone—stones that had been dragged from quarries or ruins and stacked haphazardly, like the orcs had understood the concept of defense but not the precision. Still, they stood, looming ten feet high in places. Enough to delay an uncoordinated assault.
"They're not just beasts," Eris said quietly.
It was a thought none of them wanted to say aloud. But the proof stood before them.
And at the city's heart, like the final punchline in some cruel cosmic joke, rose the castle.
It loomed like a tombstone over the dead world.
Unlike the crude homes around it, the castle was built of refined stone—smooth, aged, but deliberate. Its arches were symmetrical, its towers reaching toward the sky like fingers grasping for something long forgotten. Moss no longer clung to it. Time had scrubbed it clean, left it bare.
"Human," Rovik said, eyes narrowed. "That was human craftsmanship."
"No," Koda corrected softly. "Something older. We're standing in what came after."
The city was a tumor that had grown around the bones of something ancient. Whatever race built that castle was long gone. Perhaps consumed. Perhaps extinct. But the orcs had claimed it now—twisting it, living in its shadow like parasites feeding off the memory of greatness.
And now, humanity stood at their gates.
The irony settled in like dust.
They were the invaders. They had come to end the infection at its source.
But the question they hadn't yet asked hovered in the poisoned air around them.
What was waiting inside?
——
The dead city groaned beneath their feet.
Buildings leaned at odd angles, cracked support beams creaking softly in the still air as though they resented the trespass of life. The wind had long since died here—what drifted through the narrow streets was not a breeze but a residual chill, the aftertaste of something ancient and wrong.
The support team was the first to take proper readings. Rovik led the effort, his fingers tracing sigils across thin stone tablets etched with detection arrays. Several of the mana-tuned soldiers spread out, testing leylines, the ambient aether, and even the ground itself.
And came back with the same answer.
"Nothing," Rovik muttered, his jaw set. "There's no natural mana left in this place."
Koda frowned. "None?"
"Only echoes," Rovik said, his eyes shifting toward the distant spire that loomed at the city's heart. "Faint traces, pulled like threads—all of it flowing toward that."
The castle. It stood tall at the city's center, its silhouette stark and sharp against the gray sky. The spire at its peak pulsed faintly—not with light, but with something else. Something colder. A gravitational pull of magic, like the world's veins had been sucked dry, drawn into a singular, hungry maw.
Koda stepped closer to Rovik, watching that distant spire.
"The heart?" he asked.
Rovik nodded once. "Almost certainly. Whatever that thing is, it's where the mana's gone. And probably where the scar is anchored."
It was as if the world had been drunk dry. This wasn't just ruin—it was consumption. Gluttony without purpose. Something had devoured everything that lived, everything that breathed, and now it clung to the last remnants of power it had stolen.
They would need to take the castle.
Eris and her scouts melted into the ruined city, darting through the twisted alleys and clambering over piles of debris to estimate numbers and layout. Their return, several tense hours later, was swift and silent.
They gathered just outside the outer wall of the city, among the shadows of broken towers and rotting beams. The scouts reported grim findings.
"There's one gate still usable," Eris explained, unfurling a rough sketch carved into a tanned hide. "Here, on the eastern side. Wide enough for an entire squad to push through if we're fast."
"What about numbers?" Dara asked, leaning in.
"A hundred, give or take," Eris replied. "Mostly clustered around the central thoroughfare and guarding the spire courtyard. Four of the generals are alive—bigger, meaner, armored. They're spread out but seem to rotate patrols. None of them stray far from the castle."
The group fell quiet.
The numbers weren't small, but they weren't overwhelming. Still—this wasn't an ambush. It was a siege. On enemy ground.
They formed the plan in deliberate pieces.
Team 1—Koda and Torren—would lead the assault on the gate. Their role: shock and devastation. They would breach the entry point and pave the way with brute force.
Team 3, Dara and her six infantry, would charge in immediately after and establish a beachhead. They'd hold the ground inside, anchoring the push.
Team 4, Rovik and the seven support specialists, would follow close behind, using barriers, healing magic, and mana suppression fields to stabilize the breach and hold the rear against flanking.
Team 2, Eris and her scouts, would continue to weave through the city's skeletal veins—eliminating patrols, thinning numbers, and providing intel through relayed signals.
Koda's eyes lingered on the towering spire of the castle once more. Its walls were ancient stone—smooth and unnatural in their perfection. Nothing like the crude settlement that had been cobbled together around it. And in the streets leading toward it, the stench of rot and old blood lingered, embedded in the wood and stone.
Bones lined the alleys. Human. Orc. And others—too twisted to identify.
This place wasn't just built to be lived in. It was built to feed.
The houses were hollow shells, shelters not from the cold but from observation. The walls were not secure, not sealed. They were never meant to be. These weren't homes. They were pens.
For prey.
For livestock.
The air grew heavier as night pressed in, the city breathing in anticipation, or memory. The oppressive quiet thickened, broken only by the scuttling of orc feet on faraway rooftops, and the low grunts of sentries too bored or too full to stay silent.
This was the heart of the fallen.
And the siege began at dawn.