The Hunter's Arrival
Cael trekked deeper into the southern icefields, exhausted but alert. Something had changed since the seal—he could feel the world watching him.
And then the wind shifted.
Snap!
A mana-thread trap ignited beneath his foot—he rolled forward, narrowly dodging an arc of kinetic flame.
A silhouette stepped into view atop a frozen ridge.
She wore a cloak stitched with noble crests, goggles with rotating lenses, and gloves humming with micro-relays of Essentia. Her aura wasn't wild like the beasts—it was refined.
"Relax," she called. "I'm not here to kill you. Yet."
The Relic Broker
Name: Mireth Valzeir
Affiliation: Unknown (but too well-equipped to be alone)
Profession: "Collector of Irreplaceable Things"
She circled him cautiously, eyeing his shard and the dagger at his belt.
"Two relics already? Tsk. Most of the world still thinks the Fracture was a myth."
"Either you're incredibly lucky… or very, very doomed."
Cael raised his guard. "If you're here for them, you'll have to fight me."
Mireth smirked.
"Fight? No.
Negotiate."
Terms and Threats
They talked beside a fire under a glacier's overhang.
She offered information—names of cities that have unknowingly built atop inactive seals, whispers of other shard-bearers in distant continents, signs of awakening.
In return, she asked for one thing: not the relics—
"I want the Loop. The paradox ring.
It's calling too many things to you. Including… them."
Cael refused.
Mireth shrugged.
"Then I'll settle for a deal: I'll help you get to the next seal alive.
You'll owe me. I collect debts. Especially impossible ones."
Before Cael could answer, a sound echoed across the ice.
Like glass cracking.
Like a scream through silence.
The Frozen Leviathan
From beneath the ice, a massive form stirred.
Scales of crystal. Eyes of flickering frost. A creature born in a time before seals—before mana.
The Leviathan of Hareth's Cradle.
It had been sleeping beneath the Black Lake all along.
Cael's activation of the seal had awakened it.
It rose, dragging cold storms in its wake, mouth parting in silence that swallowed sound.
Cael and Mireth ran.
Spell cast: [Essentia Slide] – Tier 2 kinetic burst over frozen slope
Mireth: [Windwalk – Tier 3] – thin blades of air shaping footfalls
The creature gave chase for only seconds—but seconds were enough.
It roared once.
The sky cracked.
Shelter in a Forbidden Refuge
They escaped—barely—into a crevice that led into an ancient bunker, half-buried in obsidian rock. The place was filled with glyph-tech remnants and dead maps. A pre-Fracture observatory.
Inside: a mural, fractured but still decipherable. It depicted seven figures standing around a spiraling gate.
Each held a different relic.
Each stood in shadow, unnamed.
At the mural's center was the Fracture itself, rendered in voidglass.
Mireth stared at it too long.
"I don't think you realize how deep this goes."
"You're not just holding relics.
You're a fuse."