Chapter 4: Ashen Frontier

Scout Ilya found the old frontier markers buried under ash and knew the western pass would not stay quiet. The Cinderlord's fall had cracked the land further; heat and pressure sought any exit. Ash Hounds spilled through the breach, and something enormous moved in the gray beyond them — a shape of molten rock wearing the frontier like a cloak.

Ilya led a small relief party through storms of cinder and kept the miners from marching blind into the ash. The Magma Colossus, displaced by the fracture, was not hunting out of malice. It was trying to bear heat away from stone already close to rupture, scattering creatures and farmsteads in its passage like a river breaking its banks.

When the Colossus fell still at last, the tremors eased. A crystal route shone through the ash toward the north — faint, trembling, but passable. The traveler carried no banner, yet Ilya marked the safe paths that would let Velharrow's people reach one another again. The frontier had lost its old maps, but not its hope of connection.