“Find the Fractured Keystone,” Archivist Mael of the Order of the Fractured Veil had told her three days ago in the safety of Greyhaven’s monastery. “It lies in the old observatories abandoned after the Great Sundering. Something is… waking beneath the stone. The Veil grows thin there, thinner even than during your birth eclipse. We need you, Eclipse Heir. No one else walks both worlds as you do.”

Pandora smirked bitterly to herself. Of course they needed her. No one else was foolish enough to come this deep. She descended a rickety spiral stair bolted into the cavern wall, her steam-powered gauntlet scraping lightly along the railing. The deeper she went, the more the boundary between machine and flesh blurred—pipes fused into stone like veins, crystal growths blooming from abandoned drill engines, and distant whispers that might have been wind… or the dreams of the Wyrm bleeding into reality.

She paused at the edge of a ruined dwarven waystation, its brass lanterns long since shattered. Ancient elven runes carved into the walls had been partially overwritten by frantic dwarven warning marks. Her left violet eye narrowed as she sensed it—a ripple in the Shadow Weave, faint but deliberate. She was no longer alone.

Pandora rested her cane-rifle against her shoulder and spoke aloud, her voice clear and carrying through the heavy air with a hint of dry amusement:

“Well… I know you’re there. The shadows don’t lie to me, and neither does the Echo.” She tilted her head, silver-streaked black hair shifting as her amber eye gleamed. “So, stranger, native, or fellow fool chasing ghosts down here—show yourself before I decide you’re another Synod hound. I’ve had a long walk and I’m in no mood for games.”

She let a small orb of swirling eclipse shadow hover lazily above her palm, casting strange, devouring darkness that made the surrounding bioluminescence flicker. “Your move.”