Ethan vanished without ceremony.
One breath, he stood within the mirrored halls of the Kael'Dri Estate, twelve golden sentinels kneeling behind him like the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. Next, he was elsewhere.
Above water.
Not hovering, not standing, anchored.
Below him stretched a vast, ancient lake, its surface unnaturally still, as though the world itself was holding its breath. The water was dark cobalt, reflecting no sky, only depth. Four colossal mountains encircled it in a near-perfect cardinal formation, their peaks jagged and scarred, rising like the teeth of a forgotten god. Each mountain carried a different presence: one radiated heat and slow magma pulses, another exhaled cold winds sharp enough to slice thought, the third hummed with metallic resonance, and the last… the last was silent in a way that swallowed sound.
This place had not been chosen randomly.
