The road to Eldermoor is no longer safe.

Shadow creatures patrol the highways. Hollow Knights guard the crossroads. Varek’s influence has spread far beyond the city, corrupting the land itself—trees twist into unnatural shapes, water runs dark and bitter, and the sky seems perpetually overcast, even at noon.

“He’s been busy,” Theron observes as your group picks its way through an abandoned farmstead. “Three hundred years busy.”

“The Binding gave him power,” Wren explains. “The founders’ souls, trapped and suffering—their pain feeds the darkness. The more they hurt, the stronger he becomes.”

“Then we end it.” Mira’s voice is flat. “No more feeding.”

You press on, staying off the main roads, moving through fields and forests. Twice you encounter shadow creature patrols; both times, you slip past unseen. Your allies have learned to move like ghosts.

But as Eldermoor comes into view, everything changes.

The city is transformed.

A dome of purple-black light covers it, shimmering like an oil slick on water. The Purple Gem is still visible at the center, but its light is wrong—sickly, pulsing with an irregular rhythm like a diseased heart.

“Gods,” Theron breathes. “What happened?”

“Varek’s preparing,” you say, though you don’t know how you know. The relics pulse warmly against your skin. “He knows we’re coming. He’s fortifying.”

“Then how do we get in?”

A voice answers from the shadows.

“There’s a way. There’s always a way.”

You spin, weapons ready—but the figure that emerges isn’t a threat. An old man, travel-worn and weary, his robes marking him as a member of Eldermoor’s Council.

“Elder Corvus sent me,” he says. “He knew you’d come. He said… he said to tell you: ‘The tunnels remember.’”

The old passages beneath the city. The ones you explored as a child, that everyone said were dangerous and forbidden. Of course.

“Lead the way,” you say.

The old man nods and turns toward the hills. Toward the hidden entrance. Toward home.