Echo of the Sunstone

The flickering campfire cast long shadows as Anya, Bjorn, and Elara huddled together in the heart of the Whispering Woods. Here, where the Sundering's scars still bled magic into twisted bark and moss-covered stones, the very air tasted of copper and old secrets—the metallic tang that came when reality wore thin and other worlds pressed close.

Anya worked her daggers with the methodical precision of someone for whom a dull blade meant death. Each stroke of Greygate steel against mountain whetstone was a meditation, a ritual as comforting as prayer to those who'd learned to worship sharp edges. Her eyes catalogued every shadow beyond their meager light, reading threats in the darkness with the fluency of a guild-trained killer. The Crows had beaten one lesson into her above all others: trust nothing, question everything, and always keep three ways out.

Bjorn fed the fire with movements that spoke of forge-trained hands, each piece of tinder placed with the deliberation of a master craftsman building something meant to last. His gauntlets bore intricate patterns, not mere decoration, but functional rune-script that would channel and focus whatever power the mountain's deep fires still offered. His ancestral axe lay within easy reach, its blade inscribed with Khazalid prayers his grandfather had hammered into the steel with his own hands. Though he sat in human lands beneath an open sky, every breath tasted of stone halls and the weight of oaths carved in living rock.

Elara's whispered incantation was a careful threading of silver light through the damaged tapestry of reality itself. Where pre-Sundering magic might have flowed like water through natural channels, she worked with the methodical precision of a seamstress mending torn cloth, pulling threads of starlight and shadow into protective patterns, weaving them tight enough to hold but loose enough to bend. The golden glow that settled around their camp wasn't mere illumination. It was order imposed upon chaos, a small victory against a world still hemorrhaging from ancient wounds.

This was no mere bauble—it was a fragment of divine will made manifest, a tool crafted when gods still walked among mortals and magic flowed like honey from the comb. The journey back to civilization passed in comfortable silence, each of them lost in private thoughts. That night, as they shared a simple meal of travel bread and dried meat around their small fire, something indefinable had shifted between them.

The world spread before them like an unwritten book, its pages full of possibility and peril in equal measure. For Anya, Bjorn, and Elara, this was only the beginning—the first note of a song that would either save the world or watch it burn.