The air grew heavier with each step we took, filling my lungs with a strange metallic taste that made breathing feel like work. Our small party moved in tense silence through a tunnel that seemed to descend endlessly into the mountain's heart. The walls around us bore strange, glowing veins—not the healthy blue-green of natural minerals, but a sickly purple that pulsed with unnatural life.
"Do you feel that?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "It's like the mountain itself is ill."
Lyra moved closer to me, her skin reflecting the eerie purple glow. Since her prophetic trance at the altar, something had changed in her. Her violet eyes now held a haunted awareness, as if she'd glimpsed something no mortal was meant to see.
"The corruption spreads through the earth like poison through veins," she murmured. "I can sense it more clearly now—the Earth Primordial's pain radiating outward from somewhere below us."
