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The touch of my fingers to the stone was echoed with a violent boom that rocked the earth beneath our feet and sent a tremor of impact straight through the heart of me.

Panic found me in the dark, the whole world trembling with the aftershock of that touch.

But as I scrambled to keep my balance, I didn’t find the cavern caving in around us or the roof crashing down to seal us in this tomb.

I flicked my fingers to reignite my Faelight and the orange glow it emitted as it rose above my head illuminated the pillar of stone before me.

It was tall, the pale monolith rising up almost to the roof of the cavern, its triangular shape giving it three faces, each carved with a representation of one of the fire zodiac signs along with a layout of their corresponding constellations above them.

Directly in the centre of the stone, piercing the eye of the lion for Leo was a huge iron spike which had sent a spiderweb of cracks right through the monolith, disfiguring it to the point of ruin.

Nothing within this cavern spoke of other Fae having been here before, the walls that same yellow rock, the air ripe with the scent of sulphur. But this monolith hadn’t just created itself and nothing about its presence here felt natural.

I reached out hesitantly, the echoes of a million warring voices, all calling out to me demandingly seeming to radiate from that spike until the moment my fingers brushed against it and they turned into full blown shrieks of agony which ripped through my skull.

I was thrown back by the force of their pain, slamming into Bastian who caught me before I could hit the ground.

He tugged me behind him and drew his sword as if foes might leap from the dark at any moment but I stepped forward again, knocking him aside.

“You can’t fight this with steel and brawn,” I bit out, inspecting the stone again, more of Moya’s warnings resounding through my memory.

“Something has been stirring beneath the close place,” I said, glancing up at the cavernous roof and wondering how far we had fallen beneath the ground. Surely we were as deep as the space below Moya’s chambers? Perhaps we were deep enough to have roused the thing of which she’d spoken.

“Something? You mean a beast? This looks like the work of Fae not monster,” Bastian said.

I parted my lips to reply but then another memory pushed its way into my mind, one I wasn’t entirely sure I had summoned of my own accord. Of an entity of darkness itself devouring the guilty at Never Keep.

That thing hadn’t been born of ether, its power had felt so foreign to me, so rotten. But this place was alive with more ether than I’d ever known to congregate in one location before. It was teeming with energy, all of it shrieking and crying out, calling my name and begging me for mercy.

Moya had told me the dark was calling my name and here I was standing before it, unable to understand what it wanted from me.

“The point is the leash,” I repeated her words, looking to that iron spike and feeling certain I had found the answer to her riddle, the reason for whatever was stunting the ether, the thing which was forcing it to follow a path it didn’t wish to tread.

“Do you see that glow? The river of light spearing straight for this stone. It’s between this place and the next,” I said and Bastian frowned at me like he had no idea what I was talking about.

“What do you mean, ‘this place and the next’?”

I shook my head dismissively, focused on that silvery light, the river which ran right through this cavern, clearly not visible at all to Bastian and yet it was right before me when I concentrated on it.

The more I looked, the more I saw. Twisted shapes and patterns peered out at me among the rush of light, their calls to me growing louder within my mind as they found me peering back at them in turn.

They screamed my name so loudly that I wanted to clap my hands over my ears to block them out, but I knew that would only make them louder because the sound was only audible inside my own skull.

“I think…it’s made up of ether. Raw ether which should be roaming wild through every living thing in the land yet somehow has been trapped in this tide of motion,” I said hesitantly. “It’s all trapped here because of this spike.”

“Why? How can an iron spike stop ether from passing through the world the way it always has?” Bastian demanded as if I had all the answers to this somehow.

“Because this river is supposed to flow uninhibited across The Waning Lands but the spike is acting like a dam and funnelling it somewhere else instead,” I said, not knowing what any of that meant, but it was clear before me.

The stone was a marker, its existence set here with a purpose I couldn’t quite place.

My mind was racing over all the things Moya had ever taught me about ether and the way its natural magic flowed through the world.

“There are routes across the world known as ley lines,” I said slowly, running my fingers across the stone grooves which made up the lion’s mane.

“They’re roads of energy in its purest form, the simplest and most effective method of movement which ether follows.

They connect everything in direct and enormously powerful currents of energy and are marked with keystones - which must be what this is.

They’re what allow the world to keep producing new life, what gives nature its rawest source of energy and in death the energy which all life has borrowed is given back to the flow of ether once more.

It’s a part of the rite of passage from this plane to the next and yet somehow, someone is diverting that energy away from this place, taking the essence of the world’s magic and sending it somewhere… else.”

Bastian frowned at the stone monolith before us. “What would anyone do with that much power?” he asked. “Is it a weapon?”

“I can’t see how anyone could possibly wield it,” I replied.

“Ether is so potent in its raw and wild form that even those of us well practiced in commanding it can only do so for short periods of time and with only a drop of energy at our beck and call. The weight of power I felt in that river would crush anyone foolish enough to try and force it to bend to their will.”

“But that’s exactly what you’re saying is happening, isn’t it?

The energy which should be running down this ley line is being forced to divert to somewhere else.

If you know so much about dark magic then surely you have some idea as to what that could mean and why anyone would do it?

” Bastian challenged and I scowled at him in irritation.

“This would disrupt the natural balance,” I said finally. “The lack of power flowing in that direction might hurt whatever lies at the far end of the river. So perhaps the other end of this ley line is in one of the other lands and the intention is to hurt them by blocking it?”

“So the power only ever runs in one direction?” Bastian asked and I shook my head.

“No. It turns like a tide at the beck and call of the moon, though I don’t know what calls to the ether to make it change its course.

It certainly doesn’t care for the movements of the planets or anything else that looms above us in the sky.

But there’s nothing headed towards it from the other side here, so maybe it’s been blocked further down the line too? But that still doesn’t explain why .”

“Well then, spectre, I suppose that only leaves you with the one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Are you going to do anything about it now that you’ve come careening down here or are you going to leave whatever nefarious plans are taking shape here to mature?”

“I’m going to fix it,” I replied without even needing to consider it.

Something had called me to this place and the power which had been my lifeline more times than I could count was begging me to return it to its natural state.

Ether had never turned its back on me, and I wouldn’t abandon it either.

Besides, we were in Pyros so the chances were that this was the work of the Flamebringers and nothing they desired to achieve would ever align with my goals.

I braced myself for impact and held my hands out either side of the iron spike, sending out a prayer to Aquarius to watch my back because I was half certain this plan was suicide.

Bastian took a step towards me, his hand raised as if he might stop me but I clasped the spike between my palms before he could so much as lay a finger on me.

A scream tore from my throat as the rush of power slammed into me with a force so potent it was blinding, the weight of the magic blazing into my flesh as my palms blistered where I’d taken hold of the iron.

Words scored up the back of my throat, ancient, powerful words that rushed from me in a string of half audible cries as the ether took hold of my tongue and showed me what to do.

Bastian tried to pull me back but the magic hurled him aside and his curses rang out while I fell hostage to the entity that had lured me here.

I didn’t fight it. Even as my palms bubbled and boiled, the flesh melting from the force of the magic, I still spat those words from my lips with tears racing down my cheeks at the agony.

Bastian was bellowing, calling out for me even though he didn’t have a name to call me by, that stupid nickname echoing off of the walls in its place while he clawed his way towards me against the ferocious tide of power that was billowing around the cavern.

With a tremendous crash, the iron spike tore free of the stone and Bastian caught me as I fell, the force of the impact knocking us both to the ground.

A ragged sob escaped me as the iron spike finally fell from my grip, my ruined hands swimming before my eyes as I blinked through tears of pain.