They pressed on.

  No stars.

  No moons.

  No compass.

  Illara closed her compass.

  She felt the trees shifted.

  The forest gradually seemingly moving around them.

  “Do not look at it,” Matthias said again.

  The Nightblade glided up to the Mistwalker.

  “The trees,” Illara said.

  “A trick of the eyes.” Matthias said.

  “Could you be certain?” she pressed.

  “Nonetheless,” he insisted.

  The forest had thinned just enough for the canopy to break.

  A narrow wound in the leaves opened above them, revealing a slice of sky.

  She looked up.

  She felt her stomach dropped.

  “Look up, Matt.” Illara called.

  He did.

  His eyes betrayed him.

  They widened.

  “Lara…” he began.

  “Yes,” Illara said.

  The stars.

  At first, nothing seemed amiss.

  Stars glittered faintly through the mist, pale pinpricks of light scattered across the void.

  Familiar. Comforting, even.

  For a heartbeat, the old reflex stirred.

  The instinct every Astrastar carried, lessons older than lineage.

  Every Astrastar was able to read the stars.

  Navigation.

  Orientation.

  Home.

  “What do you see?” she asked as she moved up beside him.

  Matthias exhaled slowly.

  “The North Star,” he said, lifting his chin slightly.

  “There. And the Singer’s Crown. And… the Watcher at the Gate.”

  He named them from memory.

  The constellations of Arcana.

  Imparted when they were young, learned early, etched into their memory.

  For wherever they traveled, the stars shine eternal for them.

  A promise written into the heavens.

  A way home.

  Illara raised a finger.

  She pointed not at the brightest stars, but at a dim cluster half-veiled by mist.

  A constellation drilled into every Astrastar aspirants learnt to name but never to dwell on.

  “Do you recognize those stars?”

  Matthias stiffened.

  “…Yugol,” he said after a moment. “The Insatiable Hunger.”

  Illara smiled, she moved her finger across the heavens.

  “That one,” Illara said, shifting her finger slightly. “Just off it.”

  Matthias swallowed.

  “Gol-goloth. The Eater of Worlds Who Wanders the Void.”

  Yugol and Gol-goloth.

  Unseen ever in the skies of Arcana.

  Silence settled between them.

  “No,” Matthias said vehemently. “No. Old myths. Stories told to children.”

  “So are dragons.” Illara replied, “until they came to Arcana.”

  Matthias didn’t lower his gaze.

  “Look closer,” Illara bade.

  He did.

  Astrastars were no mere adventurers.

  They were star-farers.

  They knew the heavens not as poets, but as great mariners and peerless navigators.

  The positions. The distances. The constellations.

  The subtle relationships between lights and darkness.

  Matthias saw it then.

  The stars were wrong.

  Not absent.

  Not chaotic.

  Realigned.

  The constellations were true but subtly altered.

  As though the tapestry of the cosmos were rewoven with older thread.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Or… it was a tapestry when the world was young.

  Matthias’s breath caught.

  “These aren’t our stars,” he said. “Not of our age.”

  Illara nodded grimly. “They’re older.”

  The Nightblade’s mind raced, piecing it together with terrifying speed.

  “No,” he murmured. “Not older in distance. Older in time.”

  He scanned the sky again, heart pounding.

  A sky from before Arcana’s shaping.

  Before stars had settled into their hierarchy.

  A sky from an age when more lights still burned.

  When Yugol had not yet extinguished that many suns.

  When Gol-goloth had not devoured that many worlds.

  Matthias searched the skies.

  He was looking for one last sign.

  He found it.

  His gaze drifted toward the forbidden constellation.

  A primal constellation all Astrastars knew by instinct but never spoken aloud.

  The Great Dreamer.

  The one whose true name was recorded only in sealed archives and never spoken.

  It was there.

  Unmistakable.

  Matthias lowered his gaze.

  The Great Dreamer shone differently as he remembered.

  Matthias finally looked away from the sky.

  His expression had gone hard.

  “They should not be here,” he said sharply. “Not on Arcana. We should not be able to perceive them. Beyond Light.”

  Illara did not argue.

  Because she knew it too.

  The unease that had followed them since they set foot on the shore.

  The sensation of walking through a waking dream.

  The way the island bent, twisted and warped.

  Allowing the impossible to breathe.

  “The veil between worlds,” he said slowly. “Were thinned.”

  Illara nodded. “Thin enough to bleed.”

  Here, the walls between worlds had weakened.

  Fractured.

  Here, they could press through.

  Not fully, not yet.

  But enough to leave their mark.

  “We were not lost,” Matthias said in realization.

  Illara looked at him.

  “We were led,” he continued. “When the stars were right.”

  She closed her eyes briefly.

  She knew he was right.

  This island had not been found.

  It had opened.

  And whatever waited deeper within had known they were coming.

  The old man back at the inn.

  The captain and his crew.

  They were led.

  “Well, we are committed.” Illara said. “We could only move forward.”

  Mathias nodded.

  They pressed on through the forest.

  Th suffocating pall hung over them.

  An ever-present shade, thick as oil and warm as fever, clinging to skin and thought alike.

  Illara felt it first in her lungs.

  Breathing took effort here.

  Not because the air was thin, but because it resisted motion.

  Stillness as death.

  Each step they took forward were as trespass.

  The forest around them began to thin.

  Not in number, but in cohesion.

  Trees leaning away from one another at odd angles, splitting outward seemingly relinquishing their hold upon the two.

  The moss here was darker.

  Not green. Not black.

  Stained.

  “Lara,” Matthias said.

  Illara turned.

  She saw it.

  Long-dried streaks clung to bark and stone, too dark to be sap, too old to be fresh blood.

  It carried a faint metallic scent beneath the rot — copper and iron, old as memory.

  Illara slowed without signaling.

  Matthias mirrored her instantly, a shadow sliding into stillness at her side.

  They both saw it.

  A totem, hammered crudely into the earth at the edge of a clearing.

  It was bone.

  Lizard bone.

  Lashed together with sinew and vine.

  Its top was crowned with a misshapen symbol scratched into a slab of slate and nailed in place with rusted spikes.

  A sign scrawled in sickly yellow dye.

  Crude.

  Imperfect.

  But remembered.

  Illara felt the wrongness of it settled behind her eyes, a dull pressure that made focusing uncomfortable.

  The symbol crawled before her.

  Curves pulled the wrong way, lines broken where no break should be.

  Intent bleeding through the veil.

  Whispering.

  Submission.

  Invitation.

  Recognition.

  The empty eye-socket stared blindly.

  “Charming,” she murmured.

  Matthias nodded once.

  He could feel the eyes in the mist, the weight of old thought clinging to the air as strands of cobwebs.

  They smelled smoke then.

  Thin. Grey. Seeping through the trees.

  Breath escaping a dying lung.

  The Nightblade’s hand flashed in the Astrastarian battle language.

  Illara and Matthias fell into combat readiness.

  Their weapons poised, appearing in their hands.

  Their eyes found one another.

  They advanced carefully, blades loose, steps measured.

  There. Matthias signed.

  The forest opened suddenly into a clearing.

  The settlement lay before them.

  It was ringed by a wall of crude wooden pikes, their sharp ends facing outward.

  A ring of crude huts and skin tents sagged between warped trees like rotting fruit.

  Bone and wood had been lashed together with vine and tendon.

  Fire pits smoldered without flame, ash packed hard and grey as stone.

  Bone tools lay scattered where they had fallen, forgotten mid-use.

  Shapes moved in the gloom.

  Hunched.

  Limping.

  Clawed.

  Matthias and Illara crept into the undergrowth at the outskirt of the forest.

  His hand flashed.

  Lizardmen. Feral.

  Illara nodded, she crouched and peered into the encampment.

  She saw them.

  The dwellers of the settlement was strewn upon the grounds.

  Some laid face down, some leaning against the shacks and hovels.

  Butchered.

  Their scales dull and cracked.

  Illara saw one, a giant male.

  Dying.

  His thick tail twitching as he laid with his throat slit.

  His yellow, unblinking, serpentine eyes staring into the void beyond.

  His vitae pooling upon the earth.

  Hundreds upon hundreds of lizardmen.

  Illara looked away.

  Her eyes were drawn to the heart of the encampment.

  A huge hovel, a hall.

  Above the central hovel, daubed in blood and ash, hung the vague icon in yellow again.

  Crudely drawn by hands that no longer remembered their own lineage.

  Illara swallowed.

  “Who did this?” she said quietly.

  Matthias didn’t answer.

  They stepped into the clearing.

  No alarm sounded.

  No cry went up.

  No one came to meet them.

  They listened.

  Illara moved toward the nearest hut, crouching beside a pile of discarded tools.

  She lifted a blade of blackened stone.

  Too ornate and finely-crafted for where it was found.

  Its blade gleaming, its edge fine, hardened steel.

  She noted the icon etched upon the grooved hilt.

  Too deliberate for scavenging.

  Matthias appeared beside her.

  “The enemy’s,” he said. “a fine blade.”

  “Too fine.” Illara agreed.

  Matthias circled the clearing, his gaze never still.

  His presence seemed to press against the air wrong here, like a thought the place rejected.

  “They didn’t live as a tribe,” he murmured. “More like… a pack.”

  Illara followed his line of sight.

  “Primitive, simple creatures.” She said.

  Drag marks scarred the ground.

  Shallow furrows, as if something heavy had been hauled across the clearing again and again.

  Bone masks lay shattered nearby, their carvings uneven and frantic.

  One fire pit bore scorch marks spiraling inward, tight and deliberate.

  “They were caught off guard,” she said. “a raid.”

  Matthias stopped at the largest hovel.

  A dome of stretched hide and woven bone, half-collapsed.

  He reached inside and withdrew a tattered cloak.

  Lizardman make.

  Yellowed with age, stiff with old blood and ash.

  Scratched into it again and again was the crude depiction of the icon.

  Not painted, not stitched, but carved with obsessive force.

  Illara felt her jaw tighten.

  She lifted the dagger she found.

  The icon etched upon the hilt and the one on the tattered cloak was identical.

  One highly elegant, the other crude.

  “It is the same,” she said.

  Matthias nodded. “Yes.”

  “But crude,” Illara remarked, “it was as though they could not fully command their limbs.”

  “Their minds were broken.” Matthias said.

  Illara made her way into the large hovel.

  They found the shrine within the largest hut.

  A hollow dug into the base of a rotted tree, shored with mismatched stone.

  Bones ringed the pit.

  Piles upon piles of bones.

  Some yellowed, some white.

  They were woven into crude latticework with sinew and moss.

  Skulls crowned the top, not arranged, but crushed together.

  The forest had grown around them.

  Leaves and roots curled around the bones.

  At the center sat a mask.

  Split wood, smoothed by countless hands.

  No eyes. No mouth.

  A plain pallid oval wrapped in yellow-dyed reeds, its surface worn thin by devotion.

  Above it, etched into a cracked slab of slate, was the crude icon.

  Illara felt it tug at her attention, subtle but persistent.

  “Do not,” Matthias said softly.

  She stopped inches from the stone.

  The slate was warm.

  Illara withdrew her hand.

  “Touch nothing,” Matthias reiterated.

  “They worshipped this,” she said slowly. “They offered themselves.”

  Illara met Matthias’s gaze.

  “Let us depart,” she said.

  Matthias agreed wordlessly.

  They turned to depart.

  A branch snapped.

  Soft. Deliberate. Hissing.

  Illara’s blade slid into her hand without conscious thought.

  Matthias vanished into motion, daggers appearing like extensions of shadow.

  Illara drew her crescent blade.

  Dragging claws against bark. Slow. Unhurried.

  Their foes had shown themselves.

  A dozen lizardmen stood at the threshold of the hovel.

  They towered over Illara, standing around eight to nine feet tall.

  They are muscular, their thick scaly tails flicking reflectively.

  They wore tall helms with plumes, finely armored in gold and crimson, with finely-stitched embroidered cloaks.

  Illara regarded them.

  They do not appear to be kindred towards the ones they butchered.

  They wielded fine blades and polished shields.

  Like the ones she found.

  They regarded her.

  Illara readied her blade.

  They moved towards her.