The ravine spat them out at dawn onto a landscape born of nightmare. The fertile lowlands and scrub-covered hills were a forgotten memory. Before them stretched the volcanic wastes—a vast, undulating plain of black basalt and crimson cinder, scarred by fumaroles that hissed plumes of yellow-tinged steam into the sulphurous air. The ground was hot underfoot, and the very wind felt abrasive, scoured clean of life. In the distance, the peaks of the Dragon's Tooth mountains clawed at a bruised, smoky sky, their slopes streaked with veins of ominous, glowing orange.
It was a land in constant, low-grade agony, and the jade at Li's chest recoiled from it. The connection he had cherished with the earth was a discordant scream here. The stone was not patient and deep; it was violent, molten, and hungry. The familiar, green-tinged energy of the jade felt out of place, a foreigner in a realm of fire and ash.
Inquisitor An's words echoed in the silence between them. They have what we need. The quartz dragon was inert, its power suppressed. But the Dragon Master was proceeding. What else did he have?
"We have to keep moving," Mei said, her voice hoarse. She was already scanning the treacherous ground, looking for a path. "They'll expect us to die out here. We have to prove them wrong."
Their flight became a death march. Water was their first and most desperate need. They found a few brackish pools, the water tainted with sulphur, drinking it only when the alternative was delirium. Food was nonexistent. They chewed on bitter lichen that grew in the lee of rocks, their stomachs cramping in protest. The sun, when it broke through the perpetual haze, was a merciless brass eye, and the nights were bitingly cold.
Li felt his strength waning, the jade's energy struggling to sustain him in this blighted place. It was like trying to breathe water. His control, so hard-won in the peaceful valley, felt clumsy and useless. When he tried to sense the land, all he felt was a vast, simmering rage, the memory of ancient cataclysms that had no room for his subtle whispers.
On the third day, they found the first sign that they were not alone in the wastes. It was a marker—a obsidian shard driven into the ground, carved with the coiled dragon sigil. A few paces beyond it, they found a skeleton, picked clean by the acidic winds. It was not a soldier. Its hands were still bound behind its back with rusted manacles. A slave, or a prisoner, discarded on the approach to the citadel.
They found more as they pressed on. A trail of bones and broken spirits, leading ever eastward. It was a grisly road, and they were following it.
It was Mei who saw the smoke. Not from a fumarole, but a thin, grey column rising from behind a ridge of jagged black rock. "A settlement," she whispered, a flicker of desperate hope in her eyes. "Or an outpost."
They approached with an caution born of exhaustion and paranoia. Cresting the ridge, they looked down upon a sight that stole what little breath they had left.
It was not a village. It was a quarry. A massive, open scar on the face of the plain, swarming with figures. Hundreds of men, skeletal and shuffling in leg-irons, hacked at the black rock with primitive tools. Over them stood Azure Cloud taskmasters, their whips cracking like gunshots in the thin air. The prisoners were quarrying blocks of a strange, glassy obsidian, which teams of other slaves loaded onto massive sledges to be dragged towards the distant mountains.
And in the center of the quarry, mounted on a raised platform of the same black stone, was a familiar, sharp-featured figure. Inquisitor An. She observed the work with the detached interest of a architect watching ants build a mound.
"This is where he's getting the stone," Li breathed, his hand going to the jade. The scale of the operation was staggering. The amount of obsidian being torn from the earth… it could only be for one thing. The altar. The platform for the Great Ascension.
As they watched, a fight broke out near the base of the platform. A slave, driven beyond endurance, tackled a taskmaster. The response was swift and brutal. Two guards descended, dragging the man away from the others. They forced him to his knees before Inquisitor An's platform.
The Inquisitor did not even look at him. She gave a slight, almost bored wave of her hand.
One of the guards drew his sword. There was no ceremony, no speech. The blade fell. The slave's head rolled into the dust, his body slumping forward.
A ripple of terror went through the other slaves, their heads bowing lower, their movements becoming more frantic. The message was clear: resistance was not just futile; it was irrelevant. They were raw material, to be used and discarded.
Li felt a hot, sick fury rise in him, cutting through his exhaustion. This was the Dragon Master's world. A world built on bones and fear. The peaceful stewardship he had learned in the Western Valley was a universe away from this calculated cruelty.
He looked at Mei. Her face was pale, her knuckles white where she gripped the rock. She saw the same thing he did. This was not just about revenge for their village anymore. This was about something larger.
"We can't just walk past this," Li said, his voice low and hard.
"We can't fight an army," Mei replied, but her voice lacked conviction. She was looking at the slaves, at the sheer, grinding misery of the place.
"We don't fight the army," Li said, the beginnings of a desperate, insane plan forming in his mind. He looked at the jade in his hand, then at the volatile, fiery land around them. "We don't have the strength to break them. But we can break their will."
He pointed not at the guards, but at the quarry face itself. At the great, unstable wall of freshly-cut obsidian from which the slaves were carving their blocks.
"The land here is angry, Mei. It's unstable. It doesn't take much to… persuade it."
He closed his eyes, pushing past the jade's discomfort, forcing it to connect with the violent geology of the waste. He sought not the deep, patient heart of the mountain, but the shallow, simmering temper of the volcano. He found the fault lines in the quarry wall, the pockets of pressurized gas, the delicate balance of the freshly exposed rock.
He poured his fury, his revulsion, into the jade. But this time, he did not ask for control. He asked for release.
He focused on a single, critical point high on the quarry face and sent a sharp, percussive jolt of power.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a sharp crack echoed across the quarry, louder than any whip.
A fissure appeared in the black glass of the rock face. Then another. A low rumble built into a deafening roar as a massive section of the quarry wall sheared away and collapsed, crashing down in an avalanche of shattered obsidian and billowing dust.
The effect was instantaneous chaos. The taskmasters shouted in panic. The slaves, seeing the cataclysm, saw their chance. Some froze. Others, a spark of long-dead defiance in their eyes, turned on their captors, using their tools as weapons. The orderly hell of the quarry dissolved into a riot.
On her platform, Inquisitor An was no longer bored. She was on her feet, her sharp voice cutting through the din, trying to restore order. But the genie was out of the bottle.
Li and Mei did not stay to watch. Their message had been sent. As the chaos erupted behind them, they turned and fled deeper into the wastes, towards the glowing peaks, leaving behind a broken worksite and, they hoped, a seed of rebellion.
They had not freed the slaves. But they had shown them that the masters were not invincible. That the very earth they desecrated could turn against them. It was a small victory, paid for with the last of Li's strength. But as he stumbled forward, leaning on Mei, he knew it was a necessary one. They were no longer just hunters. They were a symbol. A spark in the volcanic dark.