The walls of Tatsu's cell whispered with the dying breaths of failed Anchors, their star-marks flickering like extinguished fireflies. When the door creaked open, he braced for Vorian's void-glare or Lysara's coiling whip.
Instead, an old man entered, leaning on a staff carved from fossilized star-vine. His robes were patched with crumbling maps of lands Tatsu had never heard of.
"Up, boy," the man said, voice like wind through ruins. "You've sulked long enough. The world's not waiting."
Tatsu didn't move. "Who are you?"
The man grinned, revealing teeth etched with celestial runes.
"Alaric. The Cartographer. And you're late for your first lesson."
Alaric's "classroom" unfolded like a breach in reality, a hollow star-core chamber buried deep beneath the Bastion. As he stepped forward, stardust surged around him, and globes of molten light ignited above, orbiting like fading suns caught in his gravitational will. The air shimmered with ancient pressure, as if the room itself obeyed him.
"This place," Alaric said, tossing Tatsu a levity apple, "is called Eclipsia by the star-born. The Shattered Sky by Cabal zealots. But its true name?" He tapped his skull. "Forgotten. Like most truths."
Tatsu bit the apple, sweet, laced with static. "Why does it matter?"
"Names are gravity. They shape how we fall." Alaric unrolled a map stitched with broken coastlines. "Eclipsia isn't a world. It's a wound. And it's still bleeding."
Tatsu narrowed his eyes. "Then what is Eclipsia?"
Alaric's eyes gleamed, and he extended his staff toward the swirling stardust. The orbiting globes slowed, realigned, and began to mimic a sprawling continent fracturing apart.
"Eclipsia was once whole before the Splintering. Before the First Star died. What remains now is a shattered echo, caught between realities. A graveyard of unfinished worlds, drifting on the dying breath of cosmic law."
The projection zoomed into one of the drifting fragments: a jagged landmass wrapped in Everstorms and crawling anomalies.
"Every piece of Eclipsia is alive in its own way. Some hunger. Some dream. Some remember. But none obey the laws we knew."
He tapped the fragment, and it dissolved into writhing glyphs. "This world does not want to be mapped. That is why we must."
Tatsu followed Alaric into a hidden atrium buried within the Bastion's bones. The old man raised his staff, and the world responded. The air warped, colors bled together, and a low hum pulsed from the floor. With a slow, deliberate motion, Alaric traced a circle in the dust, runes igniting in his wake. Space folded inward.
The room transformed.
Stardust rained upward. Obsidian plates unfurled like petals, revealing an open void above, speckled with false constellations. Globes of molten light spun around them, orbiting as if held by Alaric's will alone. Time felt slower. Gravity bent oddly. This was no mere room, it was his domain.
"Welcome to your first map," Alaric said. "This is where the world begins to make sense or stops pretending to."
Tatsu took a wary step inside. "Is this a Crucible projection?"
Alaric chuckled. "Worse. It's my memory of what used to be."
He tapped the floor with his staff, and a constellation exploded into a slowly rotating cartograph. A bleeding world, split in fractal seams.
Alaric raised his staff, and the projection quivered, swirling stardust condensing into a fractured continent hung in twilight.
"This was once called the Wane Expanse," he said. "A region of Eclipsia lost not to war or time but to forgetting. The world abandoned it. The maps refused it. And yet here it is, bleeding back into memory."
He motioned to the churning landscape. "Some fragments dream. Some decay. Some have minds of their own. And this one?" His gaze fixed on the projection. "This one is returning."
Tatsu's breath caught. "Why now?"
"Because something on the edge is waking. And it remembers us."
The lights dimmed. Vines sprouted from the walls, pulsing with quiet bioluminescence.
"Lesson one," Alaric said, plucking two identical stalks. "One of these will feed you. The other will make you relive your worst death a hundred ways. Which is which?"
Tatsu hesitated.
"Wrong." Alaric tossed one to him. "You just died. Try again."
The clatter of trays and the low hum of idle chatter filled the Mess Hall. Mira, her brow furrowed, slammed her tray onto the table, the contents rattling. Her voice was sharp, cutting through the murmurs of the room.
"They say Tatsu's dead. Melted into a Husk. The Cabal took him apart and turned him into one of their puppets."
Renzo, sitting across from her, didn't even look up from the blade in his hands. His star-metal prosthetic clicked as he worked the edge, meticulously sharpening it with an eerie precision. "Then why the hell is Vorian sealing the Oubliette?" He paused, his one good eye catching Mira's gaze. "If Tatsu's dead, he's not the one they're worried about. They're hiding something."
Mira clenched her fists, her eyes darting around the room, but she couldn't shake the doubt gnawing at her. "Maybe he's a threat to them now. Or worse..." She shook her head. "A puppet. Controlled by the Throne. Who knows what the Cabal's doing with him."
A Dawnbreaker initiate, sitting nearby and eavesdropping, leaned in with a sly smile. His eyes gleamed as he dropped his voice to a whisper that still managed to carry across the table. "I heard he's plotting with the Fallow Star now. Working with them to bring about the end of the Bastion." He chuckled darkly. "Maybe Tatsu's not the hero we thought he was."
Mira shot him a venomous look. "You've got it all wrong, you fool. He's not the enemy. Not yet."
Renzo's prosthetic hand paused, the sharp metallic scrape of the blade against the whetstone filling the silence. He tilted his head slightly. "They're scared, Mira. Of him, of what he is. They wouldn't be locking him away if they weren't."
The tension between them simmered, the weight of their words hanging in the air like a stormcloud, ready to burst.