Draven pressed forward, his steps firm but measured, an unyielding cadence against the roiling uncertainties beneath his boots. The road—if it could be called that—possessed an unsettling lack of permanence. Sometimes each footstep struck solid ground, dusty and cracked. Other times, the dirt seemed to ripple or sink, as though the path itself were an illusion on the verge of dissolving. His body tensed at every shift, primed for disaster, yet he forced himself to maintain composure. This land was warping; the closer they drew to Kael’Thorne, the more thoroughly the Tapestry shredded around them.
He could feel it—a subtle, steady pulse thrumming through the earth, as if it were a colossal beast lying dormant beneath miles of soil. Each beat resonated up through his spine, a faint echo of the leyline’s raw power. He had fought illusions before, tangled with the Tapestry’s manipulations in the Ashen Expanse, but here, the lines felt sharper, as though the distortions were a deliberate act rather than a simple side effect of cosmic wear. Kael’Thorne’s leyline was more than just a fractured node in reality—it was an ancient wound forcibly pried open, left to bleed magic into the realm at large.
Ahead, the sky offered no comfort. Clouds of a bruised, purplish hue hung low, lacking the fluidity one expected from natural weather. Instead, they seemed too still, as if pinned to the heavens by an unseen hand. Their oppressive presence only amplified the heavy taste in Draven’s mouth: dusty dryness mixed with a cloying sweetness reminiscent of decayed flowers. Somehow it was worse than the dryness of the Ashen Expanse, because here, there was a sense of rot at work, a slow dissolution of everything that once might have been alive or vibrant.
Beside him, Asterion swore quietly, yanking his foot from a patch of ground that rippled like liquid in response. Draven cast a quick glance, ensuring that his companion hadn’t stumbled into an illusion too deep to escape. Asterion steadied himself, one hand held slightly aloft to maintain balance. When his leg finally met firm earth again, he exhaled a sharp, shaky breath.
"It’s getting worse," Asterion muttered, eyes darting forward and back, scanning the horizon with the vigilance of a man who knew peril was only ever a heartbeat away.
Draven’s gaze remained fixed on the distance. "The leyline is exposed," he repeated, each word dripping with finality. He had said the same thing a short while ago, yet it bore repeating because each moment they walked further hammered the point home. The ground, the air, the very shape of the clouds—it all testified to a power running amok, twisting the world’s natural order.
Asterion exhaled, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. "It’s warping everything around it. I’ve seen distortions before, but this—" He paused, gesturing at the terrain ahead. Stones jutted out of the earth at impossible angles, half-melted as if touched by intense heat or arcane energy. Trees in the distance swayed in no breeze, their branches curling into tight spirals. "This is decay given form."
Draven felt a flicker of agreement, a silent acknowledgment of how unnatural it was to see illusions so thoroughly embedded in physical reality. This was not the mild blur of a half-awake dream. These changes were tangible, resonating on a level that threatened to break the world entirely.
They crested a low rise of contorted ground, rock that had been stretched and twisted like taffy. Beneath them, a broad sweep of land opened out, painted in dull hues—greens faded to a sickly gray, the earth parched and riddled with fractures that bled faint wisps of vapor. And there on a distant ridge moved shadowed shapes, humanoid in outline but not wandering in mindless confusion like the lost. Their strides were deliberate, synchronized in a manner reminiscent of soldiers or zealots.
"Cultists," Asterion remarked with a grim note in his voice. He tensed, his lean form coiled as though expecting a confrontation any second. "They’re moving in formation," he added, as if needing to confirm the disquieting fact.
Draven narrowed his eyes, recalling how he had once witnessed Council enforcers drilling in perfect unison. There was a sharp discipline to the Cultists’ steps that unsettled him. "They don’t resemble stragglers or random wanderers."
Asterion let out a soft, humorless laugh. "I ran into one of them before, in a village west of here. He kept muttering about ’Threads Becoming One.’" He paused, gaze locked on the silhouettes. "He wasn’t entirely… here. Flickered in and out, like something had unstitched him from reality and was trying to sew him back in, crooked."
Draven gave a minute tilt of his head, his expression unyielding. "And?"
With a hesitant swallow, Asterion recalled the memory more vividly. "It was as though he existed in two places at once. I could see outlines of his face shifting, the shape of his arms half-invisible. He was in the process of being rewritten, I think."
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The words hung between them, heavier than the stifling air. Draven turned those notions over in his mind, glimpses of his own experience in the Ashen Expanse surging up to meet them. He had seen illusions that possessed just enough substance to cut and wound. This was no different—perhaps worse, because these illusions were anchored to living beings, or what passed for living. "I’ve seen similar," he said, voice clipped. "In the Expanse, illusions that almost became real. It’s no surprise that Kael’Thorne’s leyline has begun breeding new horrors."
They descended from the rise, stepping carefully over patches of ground that seemed to ripple underfoot. Each step had to be deliberate, or else risk sinking into illusions that might snare them, dragging them into a half-formed realm. Asterion muttered curses under his breath every time the dirt shifted, glaring at it as though it had personally offended him.
Off to their left, the wind stirred—an unsettling phenomenon in a land that seemed to have abandoned natural weather cycles. Draven instinctively reached for the hilt of his blade, half expecting to see illusions swarm from the swirling gust. But the wind carried only a faint, distant moan, like the lament of a dying creature. It subsided as quickly as it arose, leaving the hush of the warped land to fill the gap.
In the distance, the Cultists vanished behind a rocky outcrop, their rhythmic movement lost to the haze. Draven spared a fleeting thought to whether they might circle back for an ambush, but it seemed unlikely they’d bother with half measures. Everything about them—what little he’d seen—spoke of a confidence that suggested they would confront him outright or lure him into a trap of their making. He kept his guard high, certain that another clash was inevitable.
Time lost meaning as they traveled. The sun, pale and bleary behind veils of sickly cloud, refused to rise or fall in a clear arc. In some moments, Draven felt as though they’d walked for hours; in others, it seemed no more than minutes. His sense of direction wavered, grounded only by his unwavering will and Asterion’s occasional corrections as they pressed onward. Each step brought them closer to Kael’Thorne, and each step brought a deeper sense of the Tapestry’s corruption.
They skirted around a shallow basin that glowed faintly from within, an otherworldly light that shimmered green and purple. Asterion peered over the edge, only to recoil as the basin’s surface—which might have been water—rippled with a thousand eyes that blinked in unison before vanishing beneath the surface. He swore again, stepping back. "This place… it’s not just illusions. It’s like the land is dreaming nightmares and forcing them to walk."
Draven nodded, unperturbed by the eerie display. "That’s the Tapestry unraveling. The leyline’s energy is warping the boundary between what’s real and what isn’t."
They pressed on. At times, Draven’s senses blurred—he could swear the ground was shifting underfoot in slow, serpentine waves, and the trees in the distance seemed to be breathing. He focused on the single clarity that burned within him: the need to reach the leyline. Without that power, Belisarius’s return would be unstoppable. The Tapestry wouldn’t be undone. It would be enforced to a reality that might crush everything Draven had fought for.
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Asterion occasionally shared pieces of his own scattered knowledge. He talked of hushed rumors in local settlements, of peasants fleeing illusions that had grown claws, of entire families succumbing to ephemeral diseases that left them half-transparent. Each story hammered home the chaos spreading like a cancer from Kael’Thorne. The longer they spoke, the less Draven doubted that the Cult of the Unraveled played a central role in harnessing or feeding off this malevolent transformation. The question lingered: had the Cult created this rift-like corruption, or were they simply opportunists enthralled by the possibility of rewriting the Tapestry to their liking?