The transition of command in the High Solar was swift and devoid of ceremony.
Lady Vespera stood before the slate war table, her salt-stained tricorne hat tucked beneath her arm, her sharp sea-green eyes fixed upon Aurelia. When the Empress laid out the descent to the Sunken Tombs, the admiral didn't blink, though her fingers tightened around the hilt of her rapier.
"Holding Val-Khor with six thousand veterans is simple enough," Vespera said, glancing briefly at the tied-and-bound High Barons being marched past the courtyard below by shock-marines. "The barons have lost their teeth, and the common folk are still cheering your name for breaking the Syndicate's blockade. But leaving you to plunge into the planet's gullet with only a disgraced warlord and a blind archivist turns my stomach."
"The warlord is enough to butcher an army, admiral," Malakor rumbled from the arched doorway, checking the oiled straps on his heavy shadow-iron buckler. His great sword was strapped securely over his back, alongside two heavy satchels of alchemical blasting draughts and coils of spider-silk climbing line. "And the Empress carries the fire that forged the sky. You keep the throne warm and hang any lord who looks at the crown sideways."
"If a single hair on her head is harmed, Malakor," Vespera said, her voice dropping into a razor-edged register, "I will take my fleet to the ends of the world to hunt you down."
"If she dies down there," Malakor replied, his amber eyes completely flat, "I won't be coming back up to hunt."
Aurelia stepped between them, resting a hand on Vespera’s shoulder. The touch transferred a steady, reassuring warmth that calmed the admiral’s rigid posture. "Keep the harbor clear, Vespera. If the bedrock begins to groan, sound the evacuation horns and move the population toward the high granite plateau of the Razorback. We return before the three moons align."
"May the deep waters hold you, Your Grace," Vespera murmured, sinking to one knee in a crisp, solemn salute.
An hour later, the party had cleared the city walls, bypassing the main roads to descend into the volcanic rift known as the Obsidian Maw, three leagues northeast of the capital.
The air shifted rapidly as they left the snowy crags behind. The crisp winter breeze died, replaced by a suffocating, sulfurous haze that smelled of rotten eggs and boiling metal. The path was a jagged fissure cleaved through black basalt, plunging at a forty-degree incline into the planet’s crust.
Theron led the way, his iron-tipped cane striking the stone with rhythmic precision, the emerald glow from the relic embedded in its head cutting through the choking yellow fog like a lantern through swamp-water.
"Step where the cane marks, children," Theron wheezed, his milky eyes fixed on nothing, his voice muffled behind a vinegar-soaked linen cloth tied across his nose and mouth. "The basalt here is barely three inches thick over veins of subterranean magma. One heavy boot in the wrong hollow, and you will be bone-broth before you can scream."
Aurelia walked behind him, her ancestral blade drawn and resting across her forearm.
Beneath her cuirass, the Six Shards were alive with violent agitation. They pulled downward, vibrating like iron shavings caught in the grip of a colossal subterranean lodestone. Every ten paces, a deep, sub-audible tremor hummed through the rock beneath their boots—not an earthquake, but the slow, rhythmic expansion of colossal lungs inhaling miles beneath the earth.
Malakor brought up the rear, his massive frame hunched slightly to avoid the jagged overhangs of volcanic glass. He didn't look at the glowing veins of molten red running along the fissure walls; his eyes were glued to Aurelia’s back, every muscle coiled, ready to drag her back from the abyss at the first tremor of unstable ground.
"You feel it, don't you?" Malakor’s voice came from just behind her shoulder, rough against the hissing vents of steam.
"It's waking," Aurelia whispered, her fingers curling tighter around her sword hilt. "The weight of it... it feels like an entire continent pressing against the back of my eyes. It knows the Shards are coming."
A sudden violent shudder ripped through the cavern.
A deafening groan tore from the deep stone, and thirty yards ahead, the narrow basalt ledge cracked. A massive section of the path sheared away, plunging into a yawning chasm that glowed with blinding orange magma hundreds of feet below.
Theron stumbled, his cane skittering across the slick stone, his frail body tilting toward the boiling drop.
Before the old scholar could fall, Malakor lunged forward with terrifying agility. His hand snapped out, catching Theron by the scruff of his dust-colored robes, hauling the withered man back onto solid granite with one brutal jerk of his arm.
"Keep your footing, old man," Malakor snarled, setting Theron down roughly against the wall, though his other hand immediately reached out to steady Aurelia against the trembling cliff face. "You die after you show us the door, not before."
Theron caught his breath, clutching his iron cane to his chest with trembling fingers. He pointed the emerald tip across the newly formed chasm.
On the far side of the abyss, carved directly into the heart of a solid mountain of dark red adamantine, stood the cyclopean threshold of the Sunken Tombs: two monolithic doors flanked by the petrified skeletons of horned giants, their jaws open in silent, ancient screams.
"The Gate of Kar-Drakor," Theron gasped. "And the threshold is hungry."