‘I just want out.’

  The words hung in the stale air of the cavern, not a command, nor a plea, but a simple, terrifying honesty.

  Amon did not look up from the dragon mask in his lap. His gauntleted fingers moved with practiced grace, a chisel of hardened tar scraping against the stone surface. Each stroke shaved away a layer of gray, revealing the intent beneath.

  ‘There is no out,’ he projected, patiently. ‘There is the Dream, the Dark, or the Service. Those are the paths, Kerown. There are no others.’

  The Golser paused. Amon could feel the little fish-man’s mind swimming in circles, looking for a current that wasn't there. To a being born of endless waterways and migrating tides, the concept of a stone ceiling was likely a torment worse than death.

  ‘I have this feeling,’ Kerown persisted. ‘That what you claim… is a lie.’

  Mist coiled around Amon’s shoulders, a cold, sentient dampness that whispered truths directly into his mind. Past lives, it murmured. The echoes of fifty deaths and fifty births. He remembers the currents.

  Kerown was like Sharlone, an old soul in a young world. He had lived fifty lives to Sharlone’s hundred, but fifty was enough to leave marks. Instincts. A bone-deep knowledge that cages always had locks, and locks always had keys.

  ‘Feel as you wish,’ Amon replied, blowing stone dust from the mask. ‘But the walls remain. You need not hurry. We have eternity to wait for your acceptance.’

  ‘And sleep? Like the Curtler?’

  Amon’s chisel paused. Sharlone. The great crab had lasted four months before the silence broke him, retreating into a slumber of memories to escape the suffocating safety of the Garden.

  ‘If you wish. Live out your fantasies until the taste turns to ash.’

  ‘I slept little when I was alive,’ Kerown retorted, a bubble of mirthless laughter escaping his mental projection. ‘Why start now that I am dead?’

  ‘Then it is the empty Dark, or Service.’ Amon smoothed a rough edge on the mask’s snout. ‘Belugmah is patient.’

  ‘I don’t want to be alone. Or stuck.’

  ‘Service it is.’

  A groan vibrated through the Mist. ‘Not that either. I feel… weight in that word. Binding. Anchors.’

  Amon set the tool down. The silence of the deep earth pressed against his eardrums, a heavy, comforting blanket. He understood the reluctance. To serve was to yield, to allow the Preserverant to thread its way through the spirit, knitting one’s essence into the greater tapestry of the Garden. For a creature of the open sea, it must feel like drowning.

  ‘Can I serve without the anchor?’ the fish-man asked, hope flickering in the thought. ‘Can I move?’

  Amon shifted his attention to the presence that permeated the room, the Blessing. It was a vast, subterranean ocean of consciousness, and he a droplet. The answer rippled back: Utility over total submission. Grant the leash, keep the collar.

  ‘You may,’ Amon conveyed. ‘You will tend to the Dreamers. You will have movement within the domain. But you will not receive the full gifts. You will remain… light.’

  ‘That one,’ Kerown announced, a splash of cheerful mental color infusing with the sending. ‘If I can swim, I will serve.’

  ‘You will not leave the domain.’ Amon hardened the thought, driving it like a spike into the Golser’s mind. ‘There is no ocean above, Kerown. Only fire and machines that eat souls.’

  ‘Better a small pond than a stone jar.’

  Amon felt the tar loosen around the Golser’s body. Kerown didn't bolt, he stretched, and tested his limbs. Then, immediately, he started mapping the room he was in. Amon smiled, grateful for the small victory. It wasn't perfect, since Kerown wasn't a true believer like him, he wasn't a zealot. But he was awake.

  He picked up the chisel again, but the rhythm was gone.

  Solitude was a familiar cloak, one he had worn since the day Thicketon burned. But watching Kerown’s desperate need for motion stirred an old ache. Two years in this chamber. Two years of carving stone into the likenesses of beasts he would never see again, creating a silent audience for his eternal vigil. He looked at the stone chair he sat in, draped in thick, solidified tar to mimic cushions. It was a throne of mud and memory.

  He missed the noise of the living. The chaotic, messy symphony of a village waking up. Here, the only sounds were the shifting of tectonic plates, and the whispers of the dead.

  They are your people now, the Mist reminded him. The Dreamers. The Preserved.

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  Amon nodded to the empty room. “A quiet kingdom.”

  The connection flared. Not a thought from Kerown, but a pulse from the network. The Kobolds were dreaming.

  Far above, in the tunnels that honeycombed the crust of Plide, newly saved lizard-kin slept, and in their sleep, they gossiped. Their minds were frantic, skittering things, filled with the scent of ore and the terror of the hunt. Through the Blessing, their fragmented nightmares coalesced into a map of the surface war.

  Amon closed his eyes, and the darkness behind his lids ignited with borrowed sight.

  War.

  It was not the orderly marching of legions he had imagined from old tales. It was a meat-grinder.

  The Fearless Maws—the Tharnell invaders—were clashing with the Potore. The Boarblood Hegemony. The Mist painted the Potore in strokes of gore and gluttony; massive, tusked brutes who treated the battlefield as a larder. They did not just kill; they feasted.

  The visions shifted. He saw Tharnell lines breaking, not from strategy, but from the sheer, overwhelming brutality of the Potore charge. But the Tharnell were stubborn, digging in like ticks, their soul-furnaces burning bright with the consumed essence of the fallen.

  And the Dragons.

  Great winged shadows swept over the chaotic melee, bathing both armies in indiscriminate fire. Lavia’s kin were angry, drawn by the rifts that scarred the sky like open wounds. But their rage was diluted. Too many targets, and too many ants biting at their scales.

  The Scars open, the Mist whispered. Muta is here.

  The name brought a shudder, Muta. The Changeling. The Entity of Flux.

  The vision warped. On the western front, the land itself was rebelling. Trees lashed out with root-whips that bled sap like blood. Animals fused with the undergrowth, wolves with bark for skin, deer with antlers of dripping coral. It was a riot of biology, a cancer of growth that consumed the dead and repurposed them into soldiers of shifting flesh.

  And Hestim, the Celestial of death

  The vision greyed. To the east, silence. A creeping desolation where grass withered and stone turned to dust. The spectral legions marched there, hollow things that drank the color from the world.

  Life against Death. Change against Stasis.

  “Blessed are we in the dark,” Amon breathed.

  A small, cool weight settled on his gauntlet. He looked down. Arbah stood there, her eyes pools of onyx, reflecting nothing but his own helmed face. She did not speak—she never spoke—but the comfort radiating from her was a physical warmth.

  “We are safe here, little one,” he told her, and himself.

  But the Kobolds were not done.

  A new image spiked in the collective dream, sharp and metallic. It tasted of oil and ozone.

  “Clicking sounds… harder to hurt… do not flinch.”

  The context flooded him, provided by Belugmah’s vast library of claimed memories.

  Gnomes.

  The word sounded harmless, like a fairytale creature. The reality was a nightmare of engineering.

  Automatons of War.

  Amon saw them through the eyes of a Kobold that had watched his kin be butchered. Towering bipeds of brass and enchanted steel, their movements jerky but precise. They did not roar, they did not boast, they simply advanced. A Tharnell warrior, a beast of muscle and rage, struck one with a war axe that could shatter boulders. The metal skin merely dented. The Automaton raised a limb, a complex assembly of spinning gears and glowing runes, and the Tharnell was erased in a flash of coherent light.

  They are not alive. The Mist confirmed this with a terrified tremor. Empty husks driven by logic engines and trapped lightning. Paradoxes of motion without soul.

  While the Dwarves were the ones to birth the studies of written magic, and discovered the foundational runes, it was the Gnomes who ascended such art to realms of engineering. They were the masters of technology, and the bringers of so many of the woes that realms now suffered. There was little tech that was not derived from the Gnomes, as most races merely copied, or reengineered weapons and vehicles they were able to acquire from the miniature people.?

  A race the size of children, but with heads, noses, ears, and hands that were overly large compared to their meager forms. If not for the Mist, he would never have conceived the race being feared, and that they themselves held such contempt and hate for other species that it made Dragon rage seem mild.

  They hunt Dragon Cores, the knowledge settled in Amon’s mind like a stone. They have the scent.

  The Gnomes did not want land, they did not want meat, they wanted the batteries that powered the world, and the means to make more gods. They had devices, ticking compasses of gold and crystal, that pointed unerringly toward sources of high-density magic. toward Dragons. toward Celestials.

  Towards him.

  “They can find us,” Amon realized. The safety of the bedrock, the obscurity of the deeps, it was all an illusion. The Gnomes would dig. They would bore through the world with their diamond drills until they found the pulse of the Garden.

  Logic dictated abandonment. If the Garden was threatened, the logical move was to cut ties with the Dragons Cores, to flee deeper, or to scatter.

  No.

  The refusal from the Blessing was absolute. Belugmah would not abandon its charges. The Preserverant did not yield Souls; it held them until the end of time.

  Amon looked at the mask in his hands, then at Arbah. The little girl—the memory of her—stared back with unwavering trust. The surface was a slaughterhouse; the depths were a trap. And the enemy that approached knew no fear, no pity, and no fatigue.

  Same as all the other factions and Celestials, the Gnomes would not tolerate their presence. They despised Belugmah’s nature and hated what its Scar did to Souls. When those spiteful children came for them, it would be a cleansing war.

  “We are not enough,” he whispered.

  The Preserverant understood their situation, had known the outcome laid before them, the moment that faction had arrived.

  It’s time was measured, but his?

  Arbah’s small, tar-formed fingers squeezed his gauntlet, the despair hardened into something else. Something cold and durable, like the stone he carved.

  He was Amon the Bound, son of Kir. He had been a farmer who protected his crops from the frost. Now he was a guardian who protected those under his charge, from a ravenous creation. He, the Soul was eternal, no matter the events to come, the cleansing, he would always remain.

  “Let them come,” Amon said to the silence, to the Mist, and to the child who was both there and not there. “I will preserve what is left.”